Santa Pictures

Our friend Sam had a "Santa Photo Party", which meant that she set up an amazing Christmas scene in her office where her photographer, Tanya Mally, set up to take holiday pictures of all sorts of Sam's friends who had made appointments.  We had the last appointment of the night, at 7pm.  When we arrived, we could see someone's photo shoot in progress through the window on the porch and the kids were very excited to see Santa and kept calling to him through the window - especially Max.  It took quite a bit of coaxing, in fact, to get them to go inside the house.

We got there a little before 6:30 to be able to visit a bit, but the kids aren't very well versed in actually playing WITH other kids (especially not on their own turf), so they clumped together in the kitchen a bunch.  Sam's son, Junior, ran down the hall to his room at one point, and our kids saw that and thought it looked like a great idea.  Junior's room has a big open floor of hard wood - which our kids LOVE because they can dance around and make noise, unlike on the cushy carpet at home.  Between shoots, Santa was hiding out in Sam's bedroom across the hall from Junior's and the kids kept running to the door to wave and say hi to him.  They didn't seem spooked at all.

Of course, that's not when we were taking pictures.

When it was our turn, they absolutely refused to sit still together.  Caroline found Santa's fake glass of milk and decided it was the most wonderful thing she'd ever seen.  Max and Daniel started pulling ornaments off the tree and moving wrapped presents around.  Have I mentioned I'm having second thoughts about putting up a tree at our house this year?

Finally, Tanya asked Sam if she had a bench or chair we could put the kids on to get them to sit for pictures, and she gave them a great little easy chair to relax in for individual pics in front of the tree.  Note that each of them insisted on holding Santa's milk glass.

And then Santa came in and these smiling little cherubs went into full on panic mode.  It was amazing.  Santa grabbed them all into one big embrace and Tanya got as many pictures as her rapid-fire shutter could capture before they broke free.