Lost

Decorating Christmas Cookies

Ok, I'll admit it. I'm having a hard time keeping up with this blog with a newborn around.

And yet life has been so very blog-worthy lately. It would be a crime to let these moments pass by without recording them, so I'll try.

In the weeks and days leading up to Christmas, our girls were as excited as any 4 and 6 year olds could be. They made and re-made their wish lists. They studied the Hearth Song and Magic Cabin catalogs that seemed to arrive every third afternoon in the mail. They plotted and they planned. They strategized and they schemed - all in anticipation of the big day: meeting Santa Claus and telling him what they wanted.

You see, I avoided the entire letter-writing drama and the task of having to send mail to the North Pole by insisting they could just tell him in person this year. There is, after all, a real lack of face-to-face communication in our society these days, no?

Christmas was getting closer, Gil was born early, and we sort of ignored the girls in their ceaseless quest for gift accumulation. But they needed to know - WHEN would they see Santa? WHEN would they be able to let him know just what they wanted?

We decided we would visit him at the Christkindlmart in Daley Plaza the week before Christmas. We, in spite of our almost 12 years living in the city, naively chose to visit him exactly one week before the big day - a Saturday.

The market was a mob scene. The lines were impossibly long, there were throngs of people buying stollen and gingerbread and cute little German Christmas ornaments. As we entered the plaza we could just make out the top of Santa's house next to the giant tannenbaum and the heads of hundreds of little people waiting anxiously to talk to the jolly old elf. We, instead, got in line for brats and hot chocolate. Santa could wait a little longer.

We entered the warming tent to consume our German fare and thaw our frozen fingers, and then we felt ready to tackle the Santa line. We re-emerged into the crowd of mostly drunken tourists and pushed our way through to an opening. I lead the way with Gil in the wrap and Mae by the hand. I turned to see Chris but could not find Bela.

"Would you grab her?" I asked him impatiently, assuming she had lingered behind as she is wont to do.

When he came back without her I felt rise up in me a dark, scary panic. He set off again, told me to wait right there. He was gone almost 10 minutes and I knew it could not be good. He came back again empty handed and hot tears welled up in my eyes. I dragged Mae back to the warming tent and searched frantically for Bela. Even with her white-blond hair and her bright blue coat she didn't stand out in that massive crowd. I was almost crying openly when Chris ran into a security guard who seemed to know we were looking for a lost kid.

"Are you looking for the little girl in blue?" he asked. "We've got her."

After a few radio calls on his part and some embarrassed, we're bad parents mumblings on our part, we were directed across the plaza, through the crowd once more, to where our baby girl was waiting for us - in the Santa house. With Santa.



PS - This did NOT solve our Santa problem. Not only did Mae not get to see him, Bela actually never told him what she wanted, since she was so traumatized by being abandoned by her parents. Not thrilled at the idea of waiting in line outside, Chris and I convinced them to walk a few blocks to State Street to visit Santa at his inside house - Macy's. We arrived on the fifth floor to discover that the line to visit the much more popular inside Santa was TWO hours long. Well, Chris and I don't do two hour lines, not for Santa, not for anyone. After some Disney princess bribes, we got them out of line and back home. So, did they ever get the message through to Santa? We emailed it to him before bedtime, Christmas eve.