Santa Days with Danahey on the Loose

 

 

Santa. Santa. Santa. Santa. Santa. Ho ho ho. All that stuff.

A couple of weekends ago, I took Best Fest Buddy Tom’s three grandkids to see no less than four Santa Clauses. We may have encountered some prepositional phrases and dangling participles along the way, as well.

There was a Grinch, too. The Grinch apparently has good management who helped him rebrand. He’s giving Santa a run for the old man’s money per the number of breakfasts and photo ops the mean green one now hosts.

If I were Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer or Bumble the Abominable Snowman I would be looking for new agencies to represent me. (Though Bumble does have a dating app.)

 

Santa and the Grinch were at one of our stops, a cafe. That Grinch earned his paycheck at this one as the youngest of Tom’s three kept pestering him. So much so, the Grinch went to hide in the bathroom.

That episode was after one where Santa posed for photos before a free screening of Elf. I had only seen bits and pieces of this movie before. It’s a weird movie.

As just one example, did everyone in New York City watch TV news on Christmas Eve, and the same station, to boot?

What was up with Zooey Deschanel? Apparently the dating pool in New York is or was so bad she hooks up with a grown man who has serious arrested developmental issues.

Never mind. She’s also a musician, so that’s probably nothing out of the ordinary for her. Plus, what’s Wall Street but bratty man-children with money?

Back to our Santa story.

Early the next afternoon the two boys and I hit a plant and garden nursery and a small zoo. Their big sister decided to hang out with one of her pals, not us.

Sunday’s first Santa was stationed in a big greenhouse. When we found him, he was talking to two women and a young girl.

All three of this set of Santa’s visitors were elegantly dressed in cream and gold outfits. I felt like I had walked in on the making of a perfume ad.

The two little dudes with me sometimes use their shirts to wipe their noses.

But Santa doesn’t judge.

 

 

One of Tom’s grandkids was more interested in the model train set running in the greenhouse than in seeing this Santa. The youngest, well, he’s an affable sort and started up conversation.

When Santa asked for his name, I think he told him it was Chicken Butt. Butts are funny to first graders.

The two sat for photos like fast friends, while the second grader with me had to be cajoled into a shot. This was a patient, veteran Santa, who got out of his chair to convince the kid to strike a pose.

Our task completed, we headed off without anyone breaking anything or pulling leaves off any plants. The boys did play on holiday stuff set up outside, including a huge sleigh, some big toy soldiers – and in a puddle around a Santa standing in a gazebo.

Back at the car, their sister called. Boss Girl that she can be, she wanted us to come pick her up.

We didn’t.

We were heading to the next Santa, at the small local zoo.

This guy had a fancier suit than the others, with gold trim. He sat on a bench in a building that housed a variety of wildlife. So Santa had some reptiles and a fox to his right and some big tortoises and black bunnies to his left.

As before, the first grader and Santa got along famously, while grade two played shy.

We learned that Santa’s favorite creatures in his zoo lair were the prairie dogs. They are damn cute, and they had their butts painted different colors so staff could tell them apart. Needless to say, the first grader found this hilarious.

The boys also insisted on feeding the animals. I refrained. Unless I am feeling especially lonely, I do not enjoy having my hand licked by goats or cows.

Of course, the boys spilled their cups of kibble. In fact, one of the actual paper cups wound up in the cow pen, where a calf promptly ate it. I may have overreacted to all of this.

To reset, after I made the boys use hand sanitizer, we headed back to the car. I put myself and the boys in time out. Or chill time, as the first grader took to calling it.

We all had to be quiet for 5 whole minutes. No devices could be used, even.

Next stop would be a Bricks and Minifigs Lego reseller. That’s where we met up with their grandpa and their sister.

The boys headed home with grandpa. So she wouldn’t feel like she missed anything, I took the girl to a drive-through visit of the nursery and to see the zoo Santa.

Like her one brother, she played shy there, but finally posed with the guy. So much drama for one day, eh?

Their Claus-traphobia  give me an idea. Anytime the two older of the trio act up I’m telling them we’re going to visit Santa to take photos. Or, I am going to hire a Santa to tag along with us on our adventures.

 

 

If  all the above wasn’t enough Clause time, this holiday season, their grandpa played Santa for a restaurant. Two seatings on a Saturday, two more on a Sunday morning, and for a wealthy wholesome family at their Christmas Eve gathering. A real Norman Rockwell bunch, this clan sang carols together around the piano.

Method actor that he is, Best Fest Buddy Tom grew a beard for Santa season. And he now has two Santa suits, one the traditional Coca-Cola ad style, the other a more fabulous, bishop-like red ensemble with gold trim.

He also has two probably-highly-flammable-synthetic-fabric yet festive suit jackets with matching pants.  In these get-ups, with his waxed mustache and a bow tie, he looks like a Christmas craft brewer or the emcee of a holiday show in Branson.

Santa Tom wore one of those outfits to meet another Santa, at Rosie’s during an Irish breakfast, probably breaking some Celtic space-time continuum in the process.

 

 

The kids know that Tom plays Santa, which I imagine can be a little confusing for them with the whole “believe” thing.

I told them Santa could be at so many places simultaneously because of quantum superposition. Thanks to the STEM program at their elementary school, I’m sure they totally understood what I meant.

I also told them that when I was a kid growing up on the south side of Chicago, Santa would fill our stockings with Vienna beef hot dogs, poppy seed buns, sport peppers, onions, neon green pickle relish and mustard. If you were bad, Santa would leave ketchup for you in your stocking, and only ketchup. Not even the bottle. Or packets. Just ketchup.

To thank Santa, we would leave out an Italian beef sandwich with giardiniera and a can of Old Style, with a note asking him if he could find the frog on the can.

So there’s that.

But speaking of schools, I went to see the kids sing at their holiday concerts. While they and I live in a mostly blue collar kind of town, their school is in a rich kid district.

That might explain why the first of two 45-minute shows was at lunchtime and the other a half hour after the first on the last day of school before holiday break. The kids and their families at the richer schools in the district probably had to fly out later that day to Aspen or Orlando for their vacations.

As for the concerts, they featured upbeat generic tunes which I had never heard before that sounded like 1,000 other seasonal songs.

The liveliest were about Hanukkah. I enjoyed the drumming for the Kwanza number, which reminded me of early Santana. The kids using red and green plates to perform interpretive movements to the March of the Toy Soldiers was magical.

And I recorded the recorder number to play to get people to get off my property.

By the way, teachers  do not sing like ones in movies or TV shows like Abbott Elementary. To their credit, during both concerts the kids started rhythmically clapping when the teachers sang, drowning out their drone.

So those are my Now That’s What I Call Christmas moments for 2024.

I share them today because I am getting old and may very well forget them. Also, assuming that the web still exists somewhere 10 – 15 years or so from now, this a storage space for memories to share with the kids as they enter adulthood.

Well, actually, I will leave you with one more memory.

On Christmas Adam (the eve of Christmas Eve eve) the youngest grandkid found an oversized red Christmas stocking at Tom’s place. It’s one that Shaquille O’Neal may have once worn playing an NBA game on Dec. 25.

Using skills that would be the envy of anyone taking tumbling or  improv classes at Second City, the boy wiggled his way into the giant stocking. He hopped about as if he were in a potato sack race.

Sure, he fell. In true Chumbawamba Tubthumping style, he got back up again. You’re never gonna keep him down.

This being 2024, his brother used a phone to record the sock- hopping and all the giggling he and his siblings were doing.

It doesn’t get much more Christmas than that.

So have yourself a merry one, too.