Christmas Trees, Santa and the Binch and His Doggie

On Saturday morning we bundled up and headed off to see Santa, ready to get the traditional family photo of a two-year old screaming in terror on Santa's lap. We didn't even make it that far; Fiona, who had happily walked the whole way from our house to the drug store, froze in terror when she saw the white-bearded guy and clung so tightly to mommy and daddy that we weren't even able to get near enough to Santa to kneel with her in a photo. Perhaps next year.

After that, we picked out a tree. Decorations took place after Fiona had gone to bed (too many wires for the lights and breakable ornaments that had to be hung out of reach to be worrying about navigating around a toddler). Since she woke up on Sunday morning, though, Fiona's been excitedly pulling ornaments off of the lower branches. She doesn't have the same lingering fear of Santa that she has of airplanes, either--she took an ornament of Santa playing baseball down and carried him around the apartment for a while, saying "come on, Santa, let's go Santa" as she walked.

Of course, she probably has a warped view of Santa to begin with. We live in a neighborhood where people decorate their front lawns according to the holiday, which means Fiona can learn about ghosts and pumpkins before Halloween, or turkeys with pilgrim hats before Thanksgiving. The guy across the street from us has a giant Frosty the Snowman and a Grinch in front of his house. Fiona loved pointing to them, so we decided to show her our DVD of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Afterwards we realized that this was going to be her first frame of reference for the man in the red suit--a mean green guy who steals presents!

In all seriousness, Fiona loves the Grinch and now asks to see it pretty much every day (she has trouble with the "Gr" in his name, so when she asks for it he's the "Binch"). To her mind, though, it's a story about a dog who goes on a sled ride: