The Santa Moment
If you’re a parent, you don’t need to read the rest of this story.
It’s the story of the kid and the Santa jig, and the jig is up, and you are left as the grownup fool telling your kids for the past eight years that a giant fat man breaks into their house each year. If you’re already a parent of a kid older than mine, you know the sock-in-the-gut feeling of your baby’s childhood blinking away.
Today was that day.
I picked up my sweet Thing 2 from school, a rarity since returning to work. I took her out for a special treat (curry meat pie — my girl is special) and we spied friends outside. While we were chatting with them, our favorite toddler boy, Teddy said, looking at his hand-me-down pink tricycle, “Dis bike too small fo-me!” And his parents replied, “Well maybe you.should.ask.for.a.new.BIKE.from.SAN.TA!
And that was it.
She got it.
In one sentence. It was over.
She looked at me, took my hand, squeezed hard, and said, “Yeah, ‘Santa, or Mommy and Daddy.”
Stunned, I took her by the hand and walked away. I stared at my buddies with that Oh-Holy-Crap-That-Just-Didn’t-Happen eye stare. But it had happened. And there was no going back.
I tried to undo-the-undoable. I told her that our friends were trying to talk their son into asking for a bicycle from Santa instead of from their parents because bikes are expensive. And parents can’t afford bikes. And Santa helps because he can. And, you know, wink, wink, wink.
She didn’t buy it.
She rolled her eyes at me.
So I took her for a fancy haircut at a grownup hair salon to distract her.
Or maybe, to distract me.
She got a bob cut.
It made her look young.
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My Girl’s Spirit
Telling off Santa
I never saw it coming — my little 6-year-old, sweet as can be, full of life and laughter — that my daughter would take out Santa Claus. But she did. And how. Approaching Santa, my daughter asked him a question in Spanish, at which point he was unable to answer. And when he did with something like, “HO! LA!” she called him out. Full-stop.
Looking over at the hoopla, I saw my girl, hand on one hip, pointing with the other, giving Santa a talk. “You are a FAKE!,” she told him. “Santa knows every language in the world of every child in the world and you can’t even understand me!” Then, with all the conviction in the world, “You are a faker, faker, baker.”
I tried to stop her, but there was little I could do. A girl on a mission is unstoppable. I feebly asked her to sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what she wanted for Christmas. In response she said, “If you know when I am sleeping and know when I’m awake. If you know when I’ve been bad or good, then how do you not know what I want for Christmas?” Shit. Score one for the first grader.
Eventually I got her to sit on Santa’s lap. She did it under protest, and only after I conceded that she was right, the Macy’s dude was not Santa.
As we left, he called her back and gave her a tiny pin. She snorted and said, “Santa gives candycanes, not pins. And anyway, your beard is too short.”
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Side Gigs
