I've also got a lot of my own costs. This isn't a part-time thing for me — this is my full-time gig. So I have an operations manager, and a lot of money goes into advertising and promotions.
I spend over a hundred dollars on gloves every year. My dry-cleaning bills are pretty expensive.
The gloves I wear are band gloves that have little grips on them. Why do they have grips on them? Because when I'm turning the pages of "The Night Before Christmas" I don't have to fumble around. To me, details like this are super important.
The wigs and beards and mustaches? A friend of mine imports them from Switzerland. One wig, beard, mustache set costs me about $750, and I have five of them, which I've built up over the course of a few years.
My beard is tied on in three different spots. It's really beautiful, and children under the age of 8 have a tough time distinguishing between my beard and a real beard.
The belt cost me $400 — that was handmade from a leather maker in Montana, which a big, gold-brass buckle.
I've got a cooling vest, which law-enforcement officers use to stay cool, because I'm playing Santa Claus for upwards of 10 hours. I've got the fat suit.
I spend over $300 a year on dry cleaning with all my suits. I've got five suits that I keep in regular rotation. So pretty much as soon as I wear a suit I'm dropping it off at the dry cleaners and I'm keeping them on a constant rotation because I want to look as fresh as possible.
Driving-wise, this year I'm driving 75 hours, probably over 3,000 miles. So there's gas, tolls, and so forth.
Then there's food. Normally I cook for myself and my wife, but I don't have time for the month of December, so I end up eating out a lot, doing take-out. I tried finding a meal-delivery service. But at the end of the day, it's a lot of grab-and-go.