Photographing by Santa's Rules - NYTimes.com It's 80 degrees in New York and not yet Columbus Day, but walk into some convenience stores and you will already find plastic mistletoe and reindeer competing for shelf space with skeletons and Halloween candy. Which might be exasperating - how soon can they really begin trying to profit from the season of good will? But it's hardly troubling for Timo Alarik Pakkanen. He's a professional Santa Claus. Every day of the year. He even answers his phone, "Santa Claus." Mr. Pakkanen lives in Helsinki, Finland (for the curious, roughly 2,000 miles from the North Pole), and he was in a park one summer where the photographer Touko Hujanen was taking advantage of a warm, beautiful day to make pictures. Mr. Pakkanen, large, bearded and wearing the familiar costume, stood out. Mr. Hujanen asked if he could take a photograph. "He was like, "Oh, O.K., yeah," " Mr. Hujanen recalled. "I took his picture and then I was already walking away and then he yelled at me, "147 days until Christmas!" And I was like, wow, who is this guy? Is he, like, the real Santa Claus? Mr. Hujanen took a business card from him - it read "50 Years as Santa Claus" - and stayed in touch with Mr. Pakkanen, who eventually let Mr. Hujanen photograph him as part of a larger photography project. Mr. Pakkanen so thoroughly inhabited the role that Mr. Hujanen was convinced that Mr. Pakkanen was convinced he actually was Santa. "He wasn't just a guy, like a depressed guy dressed up as Santa Claus," Mr. Hujanen said. He really lived the thing. He believed kind of in himself. Mr. Pakkanen works primarily for tourist and promotional events in Helsinki, appearing at Christmas-themed shops or in television commercials. For the weeks leading up to Christmas, he travels to Japan, where the appetite for kitsch is insatiable and he is greeted like a rock star. The attention - and particularly the schedule - can be grueling, said Mr. Hujanen, who followed Mr. Pakkanen intermittently from August 2011 to March 2012. He would be lively and generous with the children during the day, but when he returned to his hotel room at night after 12 hours in a mall, he grew quiet and withdrawn. "He has a really tight schedule there," Mr. Hujanen said. I didn't understand that when I went there. He was like really angry at me. Like: "Man, we got to do this by Santa's rules. We're not going to stop here and take pictures." " Mr. Hujanen, 27, is a photojournalist in Helsinki, but his first job suggests a kinship with his subject - Mr. Hujanen recalled being a mascot for a local magazine called The Pearl. He dressed as a white ball, handed out magazines and threw candy at people. "I really wanted to be maybe an actor, or some kind of performer," he said. Christmas looms large in his memory. In Finland, Christmas is widely celebrated by the largely Lutheran population. But Mr. Hujanen said that early on, he understood "we were celebrating the darkest time of the year." "In Finland, this really means dark," he said. Three months of darkness. Per local custom, professional Santas emerge from the darkness to knock at your door. "It's really scary," Mr. Hujanen said. The dog is barking and this guy nobody knows comes to your house. Mr. Pakkanen, though living a fantasy, is quite alert, savvy as a marketer of himself and genuinely inclined to charity, Mr. Hujanen said. On Mr. Pakkanen's last trip to Japan he visited the Saitama prefecture, where children had been evacuated from the Miyagi prefecture, site of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster. "The children, they thought that Santa Claus is not going to come because he is afraid of the Fukushima radiation," Mr. Hujanen said. Mr. Pakkanen entered a room, "and all these children started crying. They were so happy. It was a really touching moment. And for Mr. Hujanen, it was revealing; at that moment he understood Santa meant more than as just a funny commercial character. Although the holiday trappings creep ever earlier on the calendar, perhaps Santa would appreciate our taking a moment to contemplate the whole Santa. We think about him only part of the year, and we know him only to have one emotional setting - jolly - and one set of clothes. But who is Santa? Who's delivering him good cheer? Where are his gifts? Actually, there is one. A hat. "He got it as a present and he always wears it," Mr. Hujanen said - even taking it into the sauna. One time, Mr. Hujanen followed him in. "We went to the sauna and he went all quiet and really concentrates on being the sauna," Mr. Hujanen said. It's his moment in a way. He looks more like Santa than ever, but he's not Santa at that time. The quiet time helps, since Mr. Pakkanen was sometimes irritable at the thought of wasting time as the subject of a documentary photography project. Despite the tensions, Mr. Hujanen prevailed, and the photographer might actually be the envy of generations of children. In Tokyo, he got a glimpse of the real Santa on Christmas Eve. That night, it turns out, is Mr. Pakkanen's day off. And the "real" Santa Claus, wrung out and exhausted, doesn't end the season eating milk and cookies left out by strangers and miraculously distributing presents from a sled all night. No, he's in his hotel room, shirtless, with a beer and warm sake, playing card games on a laptop. Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.