Unprofessional Parenting

So far my son has had three trips to see Santa over the course of his lifetime. The first was pretty disastrous. My son was only a couple of months old and our local grocery store advertised for pictures with Santa so we decided to try it out and see if we could get a cute picture without venturing too far from home. “Santa” turned out to be about 6-feet tall and all of maybe 160 lbs. He wore a very old and stained suit and his beard looked like a dead animal he picked up of the side of the rural highway he used to get to the store. The pictures were takes with what looked like an original Polaroid camera - the big huge prototype version. I won’t even get into describing the backdrop but I’ve seen more professional looking decorations crafted in kindergarten classrooms (I don’t think there was macaroni stuck to it but I could be wrong).

In any case we learned our lesson quickly. For the past two years we have driven the 45-minutes to the mall in town where we are greeted with an adorable and very friendly Santa who clearly loves his job.  This year my son hesitated a little at first but when Santa asked if he liked tractors he lit up and we ended up with another great picture.

Unfortunately not everyone is so lucky. American Baby is running a scary Santa picture contest and I recently visited the online gallery.  It is very funny and worth a look if you have got a few extra minutes. If you have a picture you can also upload it to enter the “Spooked by Santa” contest. Good luck!