Day 608: For the love of Santa

Forgive me if I break into a round of “Jingle Bell Rock” today. There are only 20 sleeps till Christmas, and the holiday bug has bit me.

I’m not the only one – at all of 20 months (21 months? I find I’m losing track, isn’t that awful? At what point do you stop counting in months and switch to years?) Maddie is already crazy about Christmas. We got a dump of snow this weekend, the first one of the year, and she spent much of her days with her little nose pressed against the window saying “no! no!” Which in this case, as far as I can tell, means “snow.”

We also went to visit Santa at the North Pole. Well, at the North Pole they’ve set up at the mall up the street. Maddie has a bit of a crush on Santa. Whenever she sees him she throws both hands in the air, screams “Danta!” at the top of her lungs and then covers her mouth and giggles like a lovesick schoolgirl. I guess she has a thing for the older guys. Till now she’s only seen Santa on TV, in her beloved Toys R Us catalogue, on the side of a cereal box. So we were beside ourselves with excitement, Fernando and I, at the thought of her meeting the real deal. Turns out she prefers the guy from the catalogue. While she flat out refused to sit on his lap – or on my lap, for that matter – we did manage to come to some sort of a compromise: she gave him a high five and we were on our way.

To complete this weekend’s jam-packed holiday agenda, Fernando got started on the outdoor light show. He always has big plans for the lights, but about a quarter of the way in a fuse inevitably blows and we have to scale down production. This year he went and bought one of those huge inflatable decorations for the roof of the garage. In a past life I would have called it unbearably tacky and flat-out refused to have it erected anywhere near my home. But now of course I love it; because Maddie loves it. We bundled her up and brought her outside and showed her this giant Santa on the roof and her face just lit up. Her big eyes were full of wonder, which is an expression I’ve never really understood until I saw it at that moment. We grown-ups are too saddled with expectations and experience to allow ourselves to feel wonder. Awe, sure. Surprise, of course. But wonder is something different, something reserved for the innocence of childhood.

If it takes a garish 8-foot Santa to put that look in her eyes, so be it!