DB Entertainment supplies the kit that runs the Christmas events season: Santa's grottos for shopping centres and school halls, timber-look market stalls and switch-on entertainment for town councils, rides and games for the Saturday fairs, and party kit for the office nights in between. We've been doing it since 1999, out of the same base between Sheffield and Rotherham, and the shape of the season hasn't changed much in that time - the two Saturdays before Christmas are the dates everyone wants, and everything else fills in around them.
Grottos for shopping centres and school halls
The Deluxe Santa's Grotto is a walk-in inflatable Christmas cottage, with printed brick walls, snow along the roofline, a chimney on top and a curtained archway for a front door. Inside there's a printed fireplace scene, and lights and decorations come with the unit, so a shopping centre or a school hall gets a proper grotto without any building work. We've hired inflatable grottos out every December since 2008. Children queue in to see Father Christmas, adults get their turn as well, and some companies run it as a festive photo box once the queue dies down.
Market stalls and light switch-ons
Town events are the other half of the season. Our Christmas market stalls are 3m x 4.5m mini marquees dressed with a timber-look frontage, the little huts you see on photographs of continental markets, and underneath the cladding they're industrial, council-compliant event shelters. We hold up to ten of them for town councils, schools and businesses running markets, switch-ons and festive fairs. For the switch-on itself we send the snow effects machine, which drifts faux snow over the crowd while the lights come on. It's my favourite piece of kit to send out in December, and it gets asked for again the following year more often than not.
Party nights and the December Saturdays
Office parties lean on different kit. The Rodeo Reindeer has been on staff Christmas do duty since 2008 - same mechanism as our rodeo bull, just with antlers - and disco domes look after the dancing end of the night, kids' parties and adult ones alike. The Magic Selfie Mirror has had some odd December bookings in its time, including the opening of the Ikea store in Sheffield and a run of work with Amazon around their peak trading period, when the warehouse was running flat out.
School Christmas fairs fill the Saturdays as well. One reviewer, Melissa, got in touch after a fair in December: "had the large slide for our Christmas fair on Saturday, your staff were attentive and polite and very efficient delivery nice and early (as requested)". New kit has joined the older stock along the way - the Infinity Tower and Mega Drop slide went into the range a few years back, and the Juvenile Chair O Planes and The Vault, an electronic reaction game in the same family as our Batak walls, all see December work now.
What to know before you plan one
A few things worth knowing early. December Saturdays go first, so once you have a date in mind it's worth checking availability before you book anything else around it. Indoor kit needs power and headroom: the grotto is walk-in, so it wants a hall or a retail unit with real ceiling height, and nothing inflatable goes up without a socket within reach of the blower. Each market stall is 3m x 4.5m, so a row of them needs a genuinely long frontage, and town-centre work takes longer to set up than a garden delivery because access, traffic management and agreement with the council all have to be settled before the first hut goes up. None of it is difficult, but it's all easier with a few weeks' notice.
We cover Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster, Barnsley, Worksop and Chesterfield week in, week out, and travel nationwide for the bigger bookings - the Christmas entertainment in Sheffield page is a sensible starting point if you're planning locally. Have a look through the Christmas event hire range and the disco domes if the party side is what you're after, then call 0114 345 0135 and we'll tell you which December dates are still free.
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