Desperately Seeking Magical Christmas

I beg my family every year for one very important gift—a picture of my kids on Santa’s lap. It’s my twisted way of chronicling childhood before it’s gone forever. The only problem is that getting the kids to sit on Santa’s lap isn’t an easy task by any stretch.


My husband set out with the kids today to make magic for me and was overjoyed to arrive at the mall just as Santa had taken his break to “feed his reindeer.” I’m guessing that’s code for taking a leak and wolfing down a jumbo nacho pretzel. Either way it left my husband with three children, who have gone completely mad from the anticipation of opening all the presents piled under the tree, in a mall full of stuff to buy. My eldest immediately split for the bookstore, where he admitted that he had planned to get lost long enough to miss the Santa picture. The little ones dragged their dad into the overpriced toy store that pops up miraculously in time for Christmas and disappears before angry parents can bring the broken toys back for a refund in January. That’s where my son found the gun. You know, the one that he just has to have because he’s been looking for one like it all year and it doesn’t matter that it’s close to Christmas—he just has to have it. At this point my husband is calling Santa names that put him on the naughty list.

He eventually drags his screaming son out of the store and down the velvet roped aisle where Santa in all his fake bearded glory is waiting. When it’s their turn, my son drops to the ground, folds his arms and refuses to sit on any grown man’s lap—ever! No amount of reasoning works. Not even his little sister begging him to go with her so that Santa knows she needs a new double-stroller because her old one broke. In this case broke means that she took a pair of scissors to the canopy of the stroller turning it into a sun-roof. So, my husband calls the son that’s AWOL in the bookstore. Then he texts him. Then he threatens to make him walk home in the rain.

The teenager shows up a few minutes later with that irritating “what’s the problem?” look on his face. I’m not sure what my husband promised him, but he managed to convince his little brother that Santa was cool and that sitting on his lap wasn’t as lame as it may seem.

When they arrive home I’m sitting in the kitchen staring despondently at my grocery list and wondering why I never remember to budget for the feast I’m expected to cook. My husband throws a picture frame with flashing lights into my lap. “Here. I got your present.” I smile, “You’re not wrapping it and putting it under the tree?” Um, that was the wrong thing to say—the really wrong thing to say. I look at the picture of my smiling children and I realize why it’s so important to me. In a photo Christmas looks magical—even if looks can be deceiving. I wonder if my husband will ever talk to me again.