Santa's Grotto

We operate a Santa's grotto during most of the Switch On Day event.

We charge a low entrance fee (£3.50) so that residents on lower incomes can take part. We have previously had a family rate of £10.

We give books as presents to each child that visits. This is because they are universally acceptable (no worries about food allergies etc) and because children on lower incomes may not have many books and we would like to encourage reading.

We have had a problem where families may end up with multiple copies of the same books rather than different books. In 2025 we are trying a solution: the books will be placed in different colour bags according to which book they are and families asked to take books from different bags. This means they will still get different books without knowing what they are. (Our volunteers tried out using coloured labels but the labels will not be clearly visible in the dim light of the grotto.)

Grotto visits are on a first come first served basis. We previously tried getting parents to book and pay in advance but this caused a large amount of admin work both when taking the bookings and also when letting people in when running the event.

Volunteers required:

Father Christmas
One or preferably two people to manage the queue and let one child or family in at a time