Trip to the Mall

Saturday after we got home from Sarah's meet we decided to take Alison to the mall to see Santa. She wanted Sarah to come with, but Sarah said she was too big to sit on Santa's lap (plus it is sort of creepy when you get to be that age). We got to Brookfield Square around 4:00 PM and proceeded to drive around the parking lot for about 15 minutes looking for a parking spot. It wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the buttheads who decide to park in the middle of the aisles waiting for cars to leave their parking stalls, backing up all the traffic behind them.

When we finally got in, we had to literally push our way thru the crowd to get to Santa. Apparently no one told these people that there is a recession going on. Either that or they have bought into the Obama message that the recession is over (tell that to the over 10% of Americans who are still out of work... but I digress).

By the time we reached the middle of the mall it was almost 4:30. We were worried that we would be getting there just in time for Santa to take his dinner break. I asked and they told us that Santa usually takes hi break between 5:30 and 6:00, so we had at least an hour, closer to 90 minutes of waiting. We were at the VERY end of the roped off lines, but we figured that things would move pretty quick since there were a lot of adults in line. We were sort of right. There were a lot of adults in line, but there were also a couple of groups of adults who wanted their pictures taken with Santa. That's right, you heard me... ADULTS. And not just adults, these were grandmas... all sitting on Santa's lap and sitting on the arms of his chair. Nice! We want to just have our 7 year old tell Santa what she wants for Christmaas and we have to wait for a bunch of old bitties (who I hope aren't drunk) to sit on Santa's lap, not once but twice because they weren't happy with the 4 or 5 photos they took the first time. Unreal!

We finallly got up to see Santa after about a 45 minute wait. They were broadcasting the images via a streaming webcam so we had to sign a release. Unfortunately, we didn't know this ahead of time or we could have called a few people and see if they were interested in seeing Ali tell Santa what she wanted.


In the end, we bought the minimal package. We only wanted a small picture for out "Santa and Me" photo frame. As we were leaving the mall I mentioned to Kris that I really don't miss the Christmas shopping season, and she agreed. We have been doing the majority of our shopping online where we don't need to drive around forever looking for a parking spot or muscle our way thru a crowd. And the Santa pictures were usually done right at the start of the shopping season (in many cases before Thanksgiving) on a Sunday morning after church when the crowds were minimal. I think it must be something like 5 or 6 years since we actually fought the crowds at the malls at Christmas time, and with any luck we'll be back on an anti-crowd schedule next year.