This Santa at the Mall of America aims to make every visit ‘magical’

For most people, the holiday season begins with a tree, a string of lights and maybe a tin of cookies.

For Brant Miller of New Brighton, it starts with three rounds of hair bleaching, a handmade button-up shirt and 10-hour days at Mall of America. It also means passing along most-wanted gift ideas to parents eager to figure out that year’s hottest trends.

Miller has spent a decade as one of the Santas at the Santa Experience, a photo studio inside the mall where families book time slots instead of standing in hours-long lines. When he started as Santa, he was also juggling jobs in health care and video production.

Ten years later, he’s still at it, now just a freelance video editor in the off-season. He greets more than 2,000 children each year and fine-tunes the small details that make each visit feel magical — with help from his own kids, who have become unlikely research assistants who keep him current on kid culture, from “SuperKitties” to “KPop Demon Hunters.”

In an interview edited for clarity and length, Miller shared what it’s like to be in his shoes.

Rachael Zuleger, who owns the Santa Experience with her partner, Landon [Luther], saw a show I was performing in — I’m an actor, too — and asked me if I wanted to grab a drink. We sat down, and they said, “Have you ever thought about being Santa?” I was like, “No, I’m 33. I haven’t thought about that.”

That first year, I think I did nine or 10 days at the mall, maybe even fewer, and I loved it immediately. I just had so much fun with the kids and got to just laugh all day and meet these incredible kids, and it was like, “Oh yeah, I think I’d like to do this forever.”

Absolutely. I went to school for theater, and then I started a theater company with some friends called Four Humors. I also trained with the Brave New Workshop, so I had a lot of comedy and thinking-on-my-toes experience.

I remember my first year, there were a few times where the photographer was like, “That was great. But you need to make sure that you ask them what they want for Christmas. You didn’t do that.” There are things you must do as a Santa, and I was forgetting those the first year.

As I’ve done it, I’ve really had to work on developing stamina. I have 30 days at the mall this year, and I’m still learning how to stay sharp and make every visit as magical as the one before it, never sacrificing on what the kids experienced.

One thing I do to stay fresh is rephrasing questions. The classic one is, “What do you want for Christmas this year?” But if I say that 100 times a day, it starts to grate on me. So I’ll mix it up: “I was going to ask you something … Oh yes, Christmas! What do you want this year?”

There are things I have to say out of necessity, like “Have you been good this year?” But I change the order or phrasing so I’m never just phoning it in. I never want to be that Santa. I always want to be engaged, and that’s hard.

You also have to match energy. Some kids come in bouncing off the walls and want to be silly. You have to match that — laugh with them, joke with them. But if an 18-month-old comes in scared, you have to bring everything way down.

A big part of my journey is the hair and beard because I do have a real beard, and I naturally have pretty dark brown hair.

The first year, when they asked me if I wanted to become Santa, that was a big thing. I said, “Well, I have almost black hair,” and they were like, “That’s OK, you can bleach it to make it light.”

Bleaching, you have to do it many times to get to Santa white. And you never truly get all the way to Santa white. You get to kind of a brassy color, and then you use purple shampoo to take out those brass tones, and then it’s almost there. It’s not quite right; it doesn’t look like snow until you naturally turn white.

So then I take a little bit of white hair makeup and a toothbrush, and I just brush it in gently to make it pop a little more — more like your classic Coca-Cola beard and hair.

But I think anybody can be Santa. Everyone is Santa, and Santa is everyone.