We’ve been talking about it for weeks, trying to prepare my 2 year old granddaughter Denelle for her yearly visit with Santa Clause at the mall. The first year she was only 9 months old and wasn’t really fully aware of what was going on around her. The second year went a little better… she saw Santa sitting there in his red overstuffed chair but she refused to sit on his lap. This year her Mom Jenny and I decided to talk this up to generate some enthusiasm for the upcoming event. And it worked! Or so we thought.
We got to the mall around 2 in the afternoon and made our way over to where it was all taking place. The line was long… so very long… but what did I expect for the Saturday before Christmas! But hey, tis the season and so we have to wait awhile till we moved to the head of the line. My son Ray and other daughter Amber were waiting there with us so we began to chit chat as we slowly made our way towards Santa. Jenny then thought that since our wait was so long, she would have time to run over to the Build A Bear center to purchase part of Nelle’s Christmas present so we encouraged her to go, get it done and she assured us she’d be back in time to see her daughter get her picture taken with Santa.
It didn’t seem like much time had passed before I realized we were almost at the front and Jenny had yet to return from shopping. I was getting a little nervous and unbeknownst to me so was Nelle when she realized Santa was within yelling distance. Suddenly she asked me if she could go on the choo choo train ride and I said of course we could, as soon as we were done visiting Santa but then her smile quickly faded and she grabbed my left hand with both of her little ones and squeezed it tightly and through clenched teeth said… “I DON’T WANT TO SEE SANTA, I WANT TO GO ON THE RIDE!”
I snapped my head around to bark out orders to Amber…”Quick, text your sister & tell her we have an emergency… there’s a meltdown in progress at the North Pole!” and I watched as her fingers flew over her phone’s keyboard. Within moments Jenny was walking briskly back to where we were and began to comfort Nelle. Again we tried to hype it up, telling her how Santa was going to bring her presents while she slept on Christmas Eve but first she needed to tell Santa what it was she wanted for Christmas and so Nelle began to recite a small list of what she wanted as I counted on my fingers to distract her. PHEW… meltdown aborted! Or so we thought.
It was now our turn to enter the magical wonder land & have our visit with Santa Clause. We all whipped out our cameras cause we were allowed to take additional photos of our own as long as we purchased something from them. I dropped my coat on the floor and turned to focus the camera in the general direction of where they should be when I noticed Nelle had a white knuckle hold of Jenny’s shoulders and her legs tightly wrapped around Jen’s waist and her eyes were wide with fear. We desperately tried to convince her that it was ok - we wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her, Santa’s a good guy! but she’d have nothing to do with it. Her uncle tried; her aunt tried; her 9 year old cousin Michael tried… heck, even I tried but to no avail.
You could hear a collective weary sigh from all of us as we picked our coats up off the floor, stuffed our cameras away in our pockets and turned towards the exit in total defeat. Then one of the elves came up with the brilliant idea that maybe Nelle would be less afraid if we took a group picture of all us with Santa. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea and so we posed. For 9 pictures! Someone was either blinking or looking the other way or in several of them Nelle was scowling & giving the camera man “the stink eye.” We were just about to give up once again when Jen had a heart to heart talk with Nelle saying… “Look, unless you say ‘cheese’ we’re going to have to sit here next to Santa for a long, long time so just smile & let’s get this over with!” and Nelle said “Ok” and so we all sat up straight, looked straight at the camera with our eyes wide open and said “CHEESE” and it worked! Hallelujah… a Christmas Miracle had taken place before our very eyes.
As we got up to leave, we thanked Santa for his patience and Nelle decided she wanted to give Santa a hug. So Santa held Nelle and the camera man got ready to take another picture when Nelle realized what was happening and reached for her Mom.
. . . . . . maybe next year!
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