We went to visit our Santa again this year. It’s our third year in a row at the same place with the same Santa and I hope it goes on forever. It’s a local family that does it, and a local restaurant donates the space. You get an appointment time and the room all to yourselves as you take as many pictures or just hang out. They accept donations which then go back into the community.
I was impressed by how into it E and G were this year. G ran right up and sat on Santa’s lap. Both of them loved posing for pictures and answering all of Santa’s questions. E told him that they wanted a transformer for Christmas, specifically bumblebee (which they then tried to deny on Christmas morning when they unwrapped that exact gift, even though I have video evidence. Luckily we knew better and got them Bumblebee AND the Sky something one they also wanted). G told Santa he wanted the same thing as E, and promised they could share one toy hahahhahahhaha. Luckily we had also gotten G some transformers to unwrap too.
F was scared of Santa this year, which was fine. He didn’t push and neither did we, but he kept talking to her the whole time. Because she was super excited and loved him so much… from afar. She told him that all she wanted for Christmas was a candy cane, which he promptly gave her - hopefully she doesn’t think she’ll always get such results.
As we do, we started the Christmas season off early this year. I used to have a strict, wait until after Thanksgiving rule, but it’s definitely been relaxed lately. We still don’t have any Christmas trees up, but there are wrapped presents in my house, decorations are ready to go up soon, and we’ve done a few holiday events already. Speaking of those, we’ve had some hits and misses.
One of the hits for me at least, was visiting Santa! The older two are always a bit confused about why we’re doing it, and claim they don’t want to go, but I swear they have a lot of fun once we’re there. E jumped right in on signing his name to the “nice list” book they had, and then did G’s name too while G was warming up to everything. But soon they were both chatting with Santa, posing for pictures, and of course telling their life stories.