GAITHERSBURG - The people who brought Christmas to Lakeforest Mall this year, and to Annapolis Mall, Frederick Mall and Marley Station in years past, started thinking about Santa more than a year and a half ago, in the summer of 2001.
There were no teddy bears in bow ties and tweed jackets then. No flying machines suspended from the skylights. No 30-foot-tall tree with an interactive map of the world in its trunk and a spinning globe in its boughs in the center court, either. All there was then was all there ever is when The Becker Group of Baltimore begins to design holiday decorations for a shopping mall: the idea itself.
The idea then was to dream up a theme that would incorporate the gigantic tree in storage and the 15 larger-than-life teddy bears, some wired to move and play musical instruments. What the mall wanted, according to Marketing Director Britta Monaco, was something fresh, something international, something educational, something for kids, and something that would feel like Christmas but not offend the religions or cultures of any of the people in suburban Washington who choose to spend their dollars at the mall on Interstate 270.
It was late summer when Robin Stapley, the 38-year-old creative director at The Becker Group, a British transplant who cut his teeth on stage design at Everyman Theatre, met with the creative staff at Becker's offices on Cathedral Street in Baltimore.
Stapley, who has worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Opera House, the Kennedy Center and the Folger Shakespeare Theatre, as well as for Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, looked forward to the challenge.
In many ways, the Lakeforest job was not so different from hundreds of others. The Becker Group decorates shopping centers around the world and employs 100 people. This job, like others, began with brainstorming around a conference table. It started with ideas torn from magazines, borrowed from movies, inspired by books and childhood memories. In that way, it was the same as designing the Norman Rockwell village for Sea World, and the same as envisioning the reindeer topiaries for a new mall in Orlando, where Santa sits in a garden modeled after the palace at Versailles.
For this mall, Stapley's team presented four theme ideas to management: The Twelve Days of Christmas, "Americana" evocative of Rockwell, The Nutcracker, and the one they saved for last because they liked it best. It was the notion of Santa as a 1930s globe-trotting adventurer whose teddy bear aides traveled in flying machines you might find in a book by Jules Verne.
Monaco was at the presentation meeting. The mall staff "was enchanted" with the concept, she said. From a marketing standpoint, she saw plenty of advertising tie-ins, such as radio spots featuring Santa's journal and print ads based on "The Life and Adventures of S. Claus." She came up with the notion of highlighting for shoppers some of the global goods they could find at the mall, too: From Tibet, a hand-carved antique wedding chest at Oriental Decor; from Belgium, a translated comic book at Beyond Comics, and, well, you get the idea.
In the meantime, Becker Group artists had begun transforming their original black-line sketches into multi-colored renderings that would guide painters and other subcontracted craftsmen later. By last winter, they had commissioned a Seattle company to begin manufacturing the flying machines that would be hung from iron cross beams by the same cables and technology used to hang airplanes at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
Stapley traveled to Phoenix to work with another manufacturer that would finish other parts of the set. The design team hired a Baltimore company to custom dress the teddy bears. By spring, Becker Group artists had drafted templates for vintage Christmas cards to adorn the snow-covered trees around Santa's stage. Artists looked at their boss Gordon Becker's collection to make the postcards authentic.
The 8-foot-tall wreaths the mall already owned would be freshened up with red and gold balls and be hung with teddy bears wearing aviator goggles and bomber jackets. The bears under the ivy-covered gazebo would wear red plaid vests. The bears closer to Santa would sit among hatboxes wrapped in candy cane-striped paper, and beside leather luggage made to hide the photography company's equipment and credit card-accepting machines.
The set design called for Santa to sit in an oversized leather wingback chair at center court, beneath a sparkling glass elevator and amid an arrangement of wide, carpeted steps and tumbling waterfalls. To get to him, children and their parents would wander through the tree trunk. To heighten the experience, Stapley's group used "theater tricks" to create an interactive map. Children could push a button and a vintage postcard from the Netherlands or France or Brazil would appear while an actor wished them "Season's Greetings" in Dutch, French or Portuguese.
By summer, pieces of the set began to arrive: Ornaments shaped like model-T cars and bi-planes, wings for the sleigh, the Victrola. In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, another army of sub-contracted workers began its work. From sunset to sunrise, for five days, the crews constructed the set inside the mall after it closed. The dirigible was hung. Wicker baskets beneath the hot-air balloons were stuffed with toys and baubles. Birdhouses were built on stilts in forests of trees strung with white lights. Then inches and inches of snow fell from the hands of "fluffers and tweakers," who arranged white cotton batting and white netting and sprinkled it all with iridescent glitter.
Other Becker Group folks were in Orlando at the time constructing the garden set, in Las Vegas decorating the Shops at Caesar's Forum, in malls across the country working at night while shoppers slept.
In Gaithersburg, Santa arrived on Nov. 16 and took his seat in the wingback chair under the muted blue-and-gold stripes of a tasseled awning. He's been there every day since, and the only sign of the people behind the scenes now are the fluffers and tweakers who perk up the snow every few days since it's touched by so many little hands.
Today is Santa's last day on the set, although the props will be there until Jan. 13, when a Chinese New Year display will be installed. As for Santa, he's off in the flying machine, back across the globe, until another client comes to the offices on Cathedral Street in Baltimore. There's no telling where he'll go from there.