>I Paid $30 for THIS?!

>
Last night, it was time once again for our annual pilgrimage to visit Santa Claus.

I have a love/hate relationship with the mall version of the Jolly Old Elf, and have since I was a kid. Back then the Santa in my small Georgia town was, in retrospect, probably a closet pedophile, judging from the fact that he wouldn’t let me off his lap and gave waaaaay too many kisses. I stopped visiting him as soon as I was old enough to Just Say No, but even then, I couldn’t escape him; he’d walk the mall on his breaks, looking for kids to kiss that he hadn’t gotten his hands on already.

Fortunately, today’s Santas seem to have had some training in good touch/ bad touch and are far more hands-off than the sketchy Santa of my childhood. Still, we have issues– issues I’ve written about in the past.

The short version is that our mall Santa has sort of a thing for my husband. Each year, he completely drops his North Pole spiel the moment he lays eyes on Hubs. Instead of waxing reminiscent about Mrs. Claus’s cookies, he eagerly regales my husband with stories of his own time at Hubs’s TV station, while my children sit forgotten on his lap. In the past, the kids were small enough that it was only a minor annoyance, but this year, six-year-old Punky has been asking lots of questions about Santa… and I knew that if she heard him talking about the time 25 years ago when the electrical system went haywire and he’d shone a flashlight on the anchors so that they could do the newscast, she was bound to have some, you know, concerns.

And so last night found Hubs and me standing in the Santa line, whispering contingency plans to each other as we waited.

“Maybe it’s best if I just stay out here,” Hubs said. “Then he won’t even see me.”

“But he will see you eventually,” I whispered back, “and then his feelings will be hurt because he’ll know you were avoiding him.” Hubs shrugged and I punched him in the arm.

“Hubs!” I chided. “Then he won’t bring us any presents!” We both laughed.

“You should come in with us,” I said. “Just stay in the background until the end and I’ll get the kids off his lap and out of there, and then he can talk to you.”

As it turned out, though, this year we didn’t have to worry. Once we got up close, we realized we were dealing with an entirely different Santa. The kids rattled off their lists, a series of (horrible) (overpriced) photos were taken, and a few minutes later, it was time to go.

“Say goodbye to Santa!” I said brightly to the children. As they climbed down from Santa’s lap, I saw him look up at my husband. A gleam of recognition came into his twinkling eyes and he stood up. Oh hell.

“Let’s go, kids!” I shrieked, grabbing them each by the hand and pulling them toward the exit.

“Wait, Mommy!” Punky protested. “I have to choose a coloring book! And a candy cane!”

I grabbed two coloring books from the pile and two candy canes from a box by the exit rope. “Time to go!” I said quickly. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Santa making a beeline for my husband, who was paying for the photos. “We’ve gotta go! NOW!” I fumbled with the velvet rope, trying desperately to escape before the whole carefully-guarded Santa secret was exposed. Finally, I got it open and roughly pushed the kids through. “Let’s go! Let’s go, go, go!” I said.

We made it out in the St. Nick of time. I turned back to see Santa shaking hands with my husband and merrily chatting it up.

“Why is Santa talking to Daddy?” Punky demanded as we fled.

“Because, honey,” I said, thinking quickly. “They watch Channel 4 in the North Pole!”

Crisis averted.