Scary Claus

{Image via Amazon}

Over the next 10 days I'll be doing some posts about my favorite holiday traditions. Since the holidays can be a stressful time of year as well I thought it would be fun to talk about something I did NOT like as a kid about Christmas.

When I was a kid, I was terrified of Santa Claus. My mother was never one to make us do things we were afraid of, but she did occasionally ask me to go see Santa every other year or so. I would oblige, probably because I thought I wouldn't get any presents if I didn't. I would dread the event and always feel an immense sense of relief when it was over.

In my experience, there are generally two types of Santa Claus'. The first is the general mall/strip mall Santa. This guy looks like he hasn't slept in weeks and had a beer for breakfast. His suit is ratty and his beard resembles tangled fiberglass. I.e. the Santa from A Christmas Story. The second type of Santa is the Macy's Santa. This guy is actually an old dude with a white beard. He looks more like someone's grandpa than a guy that just got off a 5 day bender. He might be a little jolly around the mid-section and his pop-culture equivalent is the Santa from Miracle on 34th Street.

It seems that most of my childhood memories of visiting Santa more closely resemble the former version. The worst was at a strip mall in the town adjacent to where I grew up. He was scary, fake beard, and not the jolly old elf he was promised to be. As I walked up the cheesy candy-cane lane, that seemed a mile away from where my mother stood and waited, I could feel my heart beat quicken. I turned back and mother waved and smiled. I looked ahead to "Santa", sitting on his ply-wood and spray painted throne, hunched over and looking hung over. He perched me on his knee and asked the obligatory question, halitosis overwhelming his words. I blurted out the first thing I could think of, American Girl doll stuff and hoped that it would soon be over. We took a quick snapshot and my mother was given a Polaroid in a card stock frame.

The next time, we went to Macy's and stood in the impossibly long line to see Santa. I'm sure it was supposed to be better. After all, Santa actually was a jolly old man this time. He wasn't in a strip mall, his digs were far superior, but somehow it didn't matter. This visit was just as bad as the one before.

While an adult can make the distinctions between the two types of Santas, kids don't bother. And why should they? At the end of the day they're sitting on a stranger's lap either way. When you think about it, taking a child to sit on a strange man's lap in a mall is a bizarre and legitimately scary thing. When you take away the illusion of the spectacle, it's easy for adults to see why this could be such a terrifying event for a child.