The blathering idiot stood in line to sit on Santa’s lap.
“Do you really think this is a good idea?” the young mother asked of the man standing with her as they tried to control three squirming kids dressed in wise men outfits.
The man grunted.
“We can always stop.”
The young woman was very pregnant.
The man grunted again.
For some wishes there isn’t enough magic in Santa’s cap … or lap.
The blathering idiot had never sat in Santa’s lap when he was a kid. Since losing the election for the highest office in he land, he decided he would do some of the other things in life he had never done before. Sitting in Santa’s lad was the first thing on his list.
He did not tell anybody: not Zoey, not Xenia, not Lydia, not anybody.
One of the kids in front of him squirmed away from her parents and was toddling away. The mother ran after her. The mother had to pick the daughter up and bring her back, kicking and screaming all the way. It was then that the blathering idiot realized all three of the kids were girls. Still, they looked as if they had been dressed to be miniature wise men.
“Are you sure?” she asked again.
She was staring hard at her husband.
He stared back. He did nothing to help control the kids.
The blathering idiot could detect a cold silence between them as the line crept forward.
As they neared the head of the line, the kids increased their antsiness.
Then they were next in line. It had been almost thirty minutes.
The boy on Santa’s lap burst into tears. After two attempts to calm the young man down, Santa looked at the mom, who, slightly red in the face, stepped up from the other side of Santa’s thrown and retrieved her son.
An elf in a pea green costume with bells on the ends of his up curled show tips and a five o’clock shadow across his downturned chin, stepped up to the red velvet rope and unhooked it from one of the poles.
“Last chance,” the woman said.
“Next,” the elf said, stepping back, clearing the way up the two steps to the dais on which Santa sat.
The man hesitated, then surged forward.
The mother and the three girls followed. They walked up to Santa, the squirmy one still in her mother’s arms, and the other two fidgeting as they moved. Then, they walked past Santa as the man, the husband, the father sat in Santa’s lap.
Seeing the man plop himself into Santa’s lap and Santa struggling to handle the size and the weight, the blathering idiot no longer had a desire to sit in Santa’s lap.
“Santa,” the man said, “I want you to bring me a baby son for Christmas.”
Then the blathering idiot suddenly felt antsy. He couldn’t remember what he wanted to ask Santa for.
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