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The Christmas pudding-maker must have 
one of the shortest windows of opportunity of any company in Britain. While everything from birthday cakes to motor cars are sold all year round, no fewer than 90 per cent 
of the millions of festive puds sold each year are consumed within the three-hour period between 1pm and 4pm on Christmas Day.

This represents an extreme version of the challenge that afflicts every business established 
to exploit our retail mania come the festive season: how to serve a market centred on one 24-hour period in the calendar? In management terms, it involves coping with 
a cash-flow model predicated on feast or famine, hiring workers on a here-today, gone-tomorrow basis and a prophetic feel for future demand. 
The good news for everyone from Christmas 
tree growers and turkey farmers to bauble manufacturers and Santa agents, however, is 
that the run-up to the big day just keeps on 
getting longer.

Harrods' Christmas World was open for business 
as early as July this year, complete with an in-store Father Christmas selling ice cream. Meanwhile, Union Jack baubles and DIY crackers were already on the shelves over at Selfridges' Christmas shop.
"Customers are ready to start thinking about Christmas in the summer," says Geraldine James, Selfridges' Christmas shop buying manager, adding that a capsule Christmas collection throughout 
the year isn't out of the question.

But Richard Hyman, strategic retail adviser to Deloitte, senses a slight conflict of interest between seller and buyer: "Retailers want the Christmas season to start earlier in order to help fill their near-empty tills," he says, "while hard-pressed consumers want it to start later because they don't have the cash to spend."

Time will tell whether it's a winning strategy. 
In the meantime, we take a look at some of 
the companies providing us with the essential 
trappings of Christmas to see how they're capitalising on Christmas creep.

MINISTRY OF FUN

Christmas sales as proportion 
of annual turnover 15-20%
Christmas rush from 6 November
Number of performers on the books 2,000
Additional seasonal Santas and Elves 60

The Ministry of Fun provides professional entertainers for events year round but Christmas demand now starts so early, according to founder James Lovell, that "it's away with 
the fireworks and up with the sleigh bells" on 
6 November. Many department stores have axed their grottoes to make space for more stock but the company still has several hundred bookings each year, not only at stores but at private parties and shopping centres.

The latter are the most challenging venues and Lovell reserves his most resilient talent for them. "That's for the younger, fitter, tougher Santa," he says, "as there is nothing worse 
than being confronted by a group of unruly 
15 year olds." Christmas may be the season to be jolly but 
it's serious business at the Ministry of Fun. "Nothing riles me more than a rubbish Santa," says Lovell. "I've seen them on Oxford Street wearing trainers, and even smoking." Most of his 60 Santas and elves are professional actors, and his reindeers are "the best in the business." All Santas sport £700 handmade costumes, and get briefed on history, etiquette, and the latest toys and music at the annual Santa School. He looks for candidates with charming characters and skills in magic tricks. "After all, the whole thing is magic. Santa has 
to visit over 842 million homes in one night."

In these days of fiscal restraint, Santas also need to be diplomats who are skilled at managing expectations — "Some parents go white with fear when their kid says that they want the latest Nintendo" — but, since you 
can't put a price on a bit of Ho Ho Ho, business is still booming at the Ministry of Fun.

BERNARD MATTHEWS FARMS

Christmas sales as proportion 
of annual turnover 15-20%
Christmas rush from first week of December
Number of employees 2,200
Additional seasonal employees 800

Last year was a good — or bad — Christmas for British turkeys depending on how you look at it. Christmas turkey sales topped £124m, and of the seven and a half million households that tucked into turkey on the big day, over one third bought birds from Bernard Matthews Farms. Despite major belt tightening across the country this year, the company is confident "consumers will want to celebrate Christmas in the traditional way with turkey playing a central part."

Planning for the Bernard Matthews turkey on your table this Christmas will have begun on its multiple farms in Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire back in June 2010. "We rear our own breeder turkeys which, once fully mature, produce all 
of the eggs for our Christmas birds," says a spokesperson. The scale and logistics of the operation are frankly mind-boggling. In addition to its own-brand turkeys, Bernard Matthew Farms supplies free-range turkey to selected retailers 
to be sold under the retailers' own brands.

"In the run up to Christmas around one million turkeys will pass through the factories for Christmas products," says the company. "Although delivery begins during the first week of December, the majority of fresh turkeys have to be ready to go on sale in the third week of December." It's said that during the peak production period, around 50,000 birds are slaughtered every day.

So Christmas trade is good, but the company — begun by the late Bernard Matthews with 20 eggs and a paraffin incubator 60 years ago — is bent on getting turkeys from field to fork year round. Around half of all UK households buy one of its products each year and, with Marco Pierre White on board as 'Turkey Ambassador', the company aims to double UK consumption by the end of the decade.

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