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I hope everyone had a great Christmas. Truly. The kind where the coffee was strong, the laughter was loud, and no one looked you dead in the eyes and said, “Quick question,” as if those two words aren’t the opening credits to a psychological thriller.
For me, Christmas arrived with a very specific assignment. Not one I applied for. Not one I interviewed for. Not one where I uploaded my beard experience into a portal that rejected me in three seconds because I didn’t include the keyword “jolly” in my summary.
I was Santa.
Physically. Fully. With commitment. The suit. The hat. The beard that sheds optimism and polyester fibers equally. The boots that looked like they were designed by someone who had only ever seen feet in a medieval painting. The voice. The posture. The whole confident walk of a man who absolutely knows what every toy does, how it was sourced, and why it is definitely age appropriate even though it makes noises that sound like a smoke detector begging for mercy.
My daughter believed every second of it.
And that’s when something quietly profound happened, which is the universe’s favorite way of changing you. It doesn’t always send a lightning bolt. Sometimes it sends a five-year-old stare so sincere it makes you question every cynical adult reflex you’ve ever used to survive emails, headlines, and the constant sensation that life is one long “circling back” with different font choices.
Because while the world outside has felt loud, uncertain, and occasionally exhausting, for a brief window of time I got to be magic. No resume required. No qualifications questioned. No algorithms deciding whether I was “the right fit.” No recruiter asking me to “walk them through my experience” as if they hadn’t just read the same paragraph three seconds earlier.
Just presence.
Just showing up.
Just being exactly who I needed to be for someone who still believes that good things arrive simply because you were kind, hopeful, and patient enough to wait.
And somewhere between the beard adhesive and the moment her eyes lit up like wonder was a renewable resource, I realized something: adulthood doesn’t kill magic. It just buries it under calendars, responsibilities, and a thousand tiny tasks that all claim to be urgent, until you forget that joy is not a performance metric. It is a human need.
Anyway. Here’s the funny part. Because Christmas didn’t just give me wonder. It gave me a role. And once you have a role, you are one step away from an organizational chart.
And once you have an organizational chart, you are one step away from an annual review.
So please enjoy this holiday report from the newest seasonal hire at the North Pole, a man who learned that Santa is not a costume. Santa is a job. And like all jobs, it comes with expectations, stakeholders, and a shocking amount of pressure to “deliver delight” without requesting additional resources.
Onboarding at the North Pole (No One Warned Me About the Stakeholders)
The first thing no one tells you about being Santa is that you don’t just put on the suit. You enter an ecosystem. A culture. A brand. You become the face of a global operation that somehow still runs without a visible IT department, which frankly makes the North Pole either the most efficient workplace in history or the most unregulated. Either way, red flags.
There is also no onboarding packet. No handbook. No HR rep walking you through “What to do if a reindeer bites you.” You just show up, suit up, and immediately realize you’re now responsible for delivering a product experience to the most honest focus group on earth, which is children, because they will not say, “Thank you for your efforts.” They will say, “Your beard looks weird,” and then stare into your soul until you become a better man.
I tried to enter the role like a professional. I thought, I’ll lean into confident warmth. I’ll exude that timeless Santa energy. I’ll project the calm of someone who has never once opened a laptop and seen seventeen unread messages titled “Following Up.”
But the moment my daughter appeared, I felt the entire weight of legacy. This was not cosplay. This was leadership.
And leadership, as we know, is mostly improvisation under pressure while pretending you have a plan.
She looked at me the way people used to look at the world before we turned every experience into a transaction. Before we started asking, “What’s the ROI of this?” like joy is a budget item and wonder is only allowed if there’s a measurable outcome.
In that moment, I understood why Santa has endured. Because Santa represents the one thing adulthood tries to quietly evict from your life: the idea that goodness can simply arrive. That not everything has to be earned through performance, optimization, or a personality assessment that asks whether you “strongly agree” you are comfortable being rejected by software.
And it hit me: my daughter wasn’t just seeing Santa. She was seeing certainty. Safety. A promise that someone is paying attention. That someone came. That someone kept the story alive.
Which is a lot for a man wearing a beard that could be described as “seasonal” and boots that could be described as “legally questionable.”
Then came the operational realities. Because magic is lovely until you have to execute it. Suddenly I’m managing supply chain narratives. I’m answering questions about how the sleigh works. I’m confirming that yes, the reindeer do, in fact, have a union, and no, I cannot discuss contract details at this time.
And I realized something else. Santa doesn’t have a job title. Santa has a mission statement. He is not a role. He is a feeling.
Which is great until you remember feelings don’t come with benefits, and seasonal labor is always one step away from “We really appreciate you, but we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates who align more closely with our reindeer-forward vision.”
Santa as a Corporate Role (Performance Metrics, Deliverables, and the KPI of Joy)
Once you’ve been Santa for even five minutes, you start noticing how quickly the world tries to turn magic into a measurable process.
Because we cannot just have a moment anymore. We need a system for the moment. A meeting about the moment. A document tracking the moment. A workflow to ensure the moment is scalable across departments, regions, and fiscal quarters.
Even Christmas is not safe.
Somewhere out there is a Santa Operations Manager who has turned joy into a dashboard. There’s a chart titled “Delight Delivered Year-Over-Year.” There’s a heat map of cookie consumption. There’s an all-hands meeting where someone says, “We’re really looking to innovate the gift experience this year,” and everyone nods while quietly fantasizing about early retirement.
And that’s the joke, but it’s also the truth: adulthood will take the most sacred things and immediately try to optimize them until they no longer feel sacred. We do it to ourselves. We look at rest and ask if it’s productive. We look at family and ask if we can squeeze it between errands. We look at wonder and ask if it’s practical.
So there I was, Santa, staring at my daughter’s joy, and my brain tried to do what it always does: measure it. Categorize it. Make it make sense. Prove it.
I had to actively stop myself from treating Christmas like a project.
Because that’s what we’ve become, isn’t it? Walking project plans. Human task managers. People who cannot sit through a moment without checking the imaginary spreadsheet in our head that tracks everything we didn’t do this year. We measure ourselves by outcomes. Titles. Milestones. Whether something tangible showed up under the tree of our effort.
But Christmas, when it’s at its best, doesn’t care about your outcomes. It does not ask for your quarterly results. It does not need your justification.
It just asks one thing: did you show up?
And I realized how rare that question is now. Most of the time we are asked if we performed. If we delivered. If we exceeded expectations. If we can do it again next quarter with fewer resources and a smile.
Santa doesn’t exceed expectations. Santa simply arrives.
That’s the whole deal. The arrival is the point. The presence is the miracle.
And what makes it funny is that this is exactly what so many of us have been starving for in everyday life: a moment where we are not being evaluated. A moment where we are not being measured against an invisible standard. A moment where we are allowed to exist without producing proof.
So yes, I wore the suit. Yes, I did the voice. Yes, I acted like a man who had never once panicked while searching his inbox for the phrase “per my last email.”
But underneath the costume, I was also a regular person remembering, briefly, what it felt like to be more than a productivity unit.
The Quiet Win (How Magic Sneaks In Through the Side Door)
Here’s what really happened that night, beneath the comedy and the beard and the faint smell of synthetic cheer.
I watched my daughter’s eyes light up the way ours used to. The way they still want to, even if we pretend we’ve outgrown that instinct. I watched her believe, without negotiating, without doubting, without needing a second opinion from a comment section.
And I felt something shift in me, like a locked door cracking open. Because wonder doesn’t disappear. It just waits patiently for permission to come back.
We spend years building armor. Some of it is necessary. Adulthood requires a certain level of “I cannot be emotionally destroyed by a scheduling email.” But some of it becomes a prison. We learn to distrust good news. We learn to guard against disappointment. We learn to treat hope like it’s naïve, like it’s an amateur move, like it makes us look foolish.
Then a child walks into the room and reminds you that hope is not foolish. It’s foundational.
She didn’t see my tiredness. She didn’t see the year’s weight. She didn’t see the stress, the unresolved things, the mental load of everything still waiting in January like a wolf at the edge of the woods.
She saw Santa.
And that’s the quiet miracle. Not that I became someone else. But that I became a version of myself who could still offer certainty and warmth even while carrying my own unseen heaviness.
That’s what so many of us are doing, by the way, even if we don’t call it magic. We show up for people. We show up tired. We show up imperfect. We show up in whatever emotional shape we are in and still manage to be present for someone else.
Sometimes the win isn’t loud.
Sometimes the win is quiet and human and small and unforgettable.
It’s being there. It’s choosing joy even when the year didn’t deliver everything you hoped it would. It’s laughing anyway. It’s making a cup of coffee and letting it be just coffee, not a coping mechanism with a five-step ritual and a side of guilt.
It’s letting a moment be a moment, without trying to monetize it or turn it into a lesson or convert it into content.
And yes, I am aware of the irony as I write this like a holiday field report from Corporate Santa Headquarters. But that’s the point. We are all trying to find our way back to something real, even if we have to joke our way there.
Final Thoughts: Beard Optional, Presence Required
If this year was heavy for you, if you smiled through parts of it, powered through others, and quietly hoped next year might be gentler, here’s what I want you to know.
You are doing better than you think.
You mattered more than you saw.
And sometimes, simply showing up as the version of yourself someone needed, even briefly, even imperfectly, is proof enough that you are still capable of magic.
Here’s to rest. Here’s to perspective. Here’s to stepping into the next season with a little more grace for ourselves.
And here’s to remembering that if a man in a borrowed beard and questionable boots can become wonder for someone he loves, then maybe the rest of us can stop treating our lives like performance reviews long enough to feel something simple and true.
Beard optional. Presence required.
