Childrearing
Mall Santas Helped To Refine My Creep-O-Meter As A Child
I’ve been suspicious of mall Santas since I was a child, possibly because my lifelong anxiety gave me an especially refined creep-o-meter. Everyone was an enemy, and any interaction was an opportunity for molestation and abduction. You should have seen me as a seven-year-old at Disneyland, accusing everyone of “being in violation of their parole.” I was an absolute joy.
Mall Santas only served to further refine my already finely tuned creep-meter, which I employed to tell my parents I was not comfortable around our across-the-street neighbor, who was later arrested! Mall Santas were a yearly exposure to creepers, and set my alarm bells off before I was old enough to know what those alarm bells meant. It’s a sense my parents were happy I was born with, because it instinctively told me to run the other direction.
As a toddler, my parents tried to go the mall Santa route, but I patently wasn’t having it. I threw a full blown fit only to calm down as soon as my parents relented and said I didn’t have to sit on that drunken stranger’s lap. It’s like I just knew. Something is not right here. I recoiled in terror at the lap-sitting. The idea of an adult in costume terrified me. Everything about it seemed wrong. I wasn’t the only perceptive child–whenever I see lines of families with children, I see about and even split of children wide eyed with excitement and wide eyed with terror, clearly being dragged by their parents. I love Santa as much as the rest of you, but why was it so important to get this picture? Every other photo involved a crying child.