Kids were in tears: visitors complain of Santa ‘shambles’ at Hampshire grotto”. So goes one headline this week though, in truth, it could have been written in any December of any year. For ’tis the season – not, it transpires, to be jolly, but to be disappointed by chronically lacklustre Christmas “experiences” up and down the nation.
At this latest iteration of a hastily thrown-together Santa’s pad, hosted by the Great Hall in Winchester, it was the fat man himself who prompted parents’ wrath and children’s weeping. St Nicholas was accused of not only having a “blatantly fake beard” and “cheap red suit”, but of even lacking the good-time persona that you’d assume was a prerequisite for the job. “He wasn’t very talkative at all – he didn’t seem very jovial,” complained hacked-off father-of-three Matthew Fernandez. “It ruined the experience.”
