Seeing Santa

Today our Advent calendar activity was to go see Santa. I wasn’t sure if the girls would want to do this, but when we saw the reindeer the other day, they expressed disappointment that Santa wasn’t there too. So, though I was unsure how it would play out, we went to visit the big guy today.

I drove 30 minutes up to the mall to get to him and was surprised and pleased that there wasn’t a line to see him. The girls could have walked right up and jumped on his lap.

Except they had no interest in doing that. They were shy and wouldn’t get much closer to him than this:

I was absolutely not going to force them to sit on the lap of a strange man if they didn’t want to, Santa or not. So I let them look at the cool teddy bear display around the path leading to Santa and was just getting them to wave to him from a distance and preparing to walk away when they both said that they did in fact want to go see him.

Some other kids had arrived after us and gone ahead to sit with Santa, so maybe seeing that gave them some courage. I don’t know, but they both started waltzing right up to him after that.

Once they got close, however, Miss said, “My sister is going to go sit on his lap, not me,” as she kind of pushed Lass ahead of her toward Santa.

Lass went right up to him, though she did seem a little unsure about it. She told him she wants, “A Big Snow White” for Christmas and got down.

How authentic is this Santa, by the way?

Even after seeing her sister do it, Miss still wasn’t willing to go up to him, so Baby Sis had her turn.

After that Miss was still a bit reluctant. I told her that it was okay if she did not want to go sit on Santa’s lap or talk to him, but that if she chose to leave without talking to him we probably wouldn’t have a chance to come back again (I could foresee her saying, as we were driving home, that she had changed her mind and did want to talk to him). So she decided that she would talk to him but did not want to sit on his lap. Fair enough. I went with her, and the very nice woman working there took a few photos for me.

She told him that she wanted, “A big Snow White, just like my sister.”

Then both girls kind of hugged him and he said, “See you on Christmas Eve!” They both got a big kick out of that.

I would have been perfectly okay with it if the girls had chosen to keep their distance from Santa. I thought that might happen when I planned the trip up there, but I wanted them to at least be able to see him.

As it turned out, I am pleased with how they took their time but managed to work through their worries to go and speak to him. I’m particularly proud of Miss for asserting herself so she could have a chance to talk to him on her terms.