Inside the immersive Sussex Santa experience that's a full family day out – and how to get tickets for 2025

They can be over so quickly, and you can feel a bit flat that you’ve paid a reasonable amount of money for something that only lasts for 20 minutes.

This is why I found the Tulleys Farm Christmas Santa Experience in West Sussex to be brilliant because it’s a full day out.

Not only do you take a sleigh ride for a group meeting and storytime with Santa in his cabin, but there’s a whole host of other activities for the family to take part in. The website suggests allowing four to five hours for the experience, but we were there from just before 9am and left just after 3pm. We could probably have stayed longer, but it was such a cold day that we wanted to go home and warm up!

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When you book tickets, you select your Santa sleigh ride time and you have to arrive 15 minutes beforehand to make sure you get there on time. It’s such a magical little experience, made all the funnier by Santa’s helpers the elves telling jokes and singing Christmas songs en route. We had 9.05am slot, which while it did require an early start to drive up to near Crawley from Worthing, meant we got in before it got busy or the queues started to back up.

When you’re with Santa, he gives each child a special Christmas star which they use to go and make a cuddly toy in his workshop. My children absolutely loved doing this. They get to stuff their chosen teddy with fur, put a heart inside, and for an extra fee can cloth it at the end. We now have a Batman tiger and a karate tiger in our family! Another bonus of having an early slot is that the children can make their teddy early and then they get to carry it around with them for the whole day.

Then there’s the other activities, all of which are so much fun and in total make for the full festive experience. There’s making reindeer food, decorating a gingerbread man, posting a letter to Santa and a Christmas market to stroll around.

Also, there’s a Christmas circus, a magical forest to walk around, a 3D show, other festive shows and a chance to discover your inner elf.

For an extra fee, you can book ice skating and there’s rides to go on.

Tickets are not the cheapest out there (we were kindly gifted this experience to review but our tickets would have been £39.95 for adults and £69.95 for children on December 22), but for a full day experience plus all the bits your children get to take home, I think it’s worth the expense.

The Tulleys Christmas Santa Experience runs annual on selected dates from the end of November through until Christmas Eve. Tickets for 2025 are not on sale yet, but you can sign up to be notified when they are through the Tulleys website now: https://www.tulleyschristmas.co.uk/