We have been doing a lot of preparing around here. I keep trying to stop and soak in the excitement that they have this year as Eli finally "gets it" and Myka still believes in Santa. With her logical mind I'm sure that won't last long. And with her desire to share everything she knows with everyone else, I'm sure Eli will know the truth within the hour of her finding it out.
We try not to overdo the whole Santa thing. Any beliefs they have about him come from their own minds and holiday cartoons. We don't go around spouting on about him and hope that even now they get that he isn't the reason for the whole holiday. But we do take them to talk to him. Once. Otherwise, I try to avoid him as much as possible.
Once I knew we had a date set to go see him, I asked the kids casually about what they wanted to ask him to bring. This is the part where I try to steer their answers to things we may or may not have already picked out for them. It's delicate work, and it takes a few days.
Especially when Eli starts out with, "I want him to bring the big truck like at Chuck E Cheese!"
This is the one he's referring to:
So I had a little work to do.
Sometime during that week, Kurt took the kids to the mall and made a stop at the toy store to give Eli some more reasonable ideas for the big guy to deliver. He came home telling me he wants a dump truck. I look at Kurt and he nods, letting me know they figured something out. And he stuck with that decision all the way up to sitting on Santa's lap and even managed to say it out loud for him. Done and done.
Upon waking up the next morning, unprompted he declared that "next time I see Santa, I'm going to tell him I want an escalator!" I quickly learned that they saw a lot of new things at the mall that day. In the last eleven days since we have visited Santa, I have heard about at least a dozen other things that Eli wants to ask Santa for. I guess he figures if there is a guy willing to bring him fun stuff he sees at the mall, he might as well go for it.
So now I'm down to ten more days of avoiding another live Santa at all costs. The shopping is done. This Santa is enjoying the rest of the season.
And I don't have room for an escalator.
