Santa Followed Us!

Here is wishing all of you a wonderful new year! For those of you who noticed the quiet blog, I have been offline on a trip to India and the Middle East for the past few weeks. The daughter was sick with worry about whether Santa would know where to find her, since she was to be away during Christmas. She left letters and cookies under the tree in our home in the US (‘Just in case’ she says!) But she need not have worried. We knew a manager who worked at one of Santa’s factories and arranged for Santa to drop his presents off for the children halfway across the globe in our hallway in Chennai.

You know? If I were Santa, I’d be quite flustered with all the last minute changes that he had to deal with last year.

1) The lists changed in the last minute. For a whole month, there was something on there, and then the day we were leaving for India, a new list appeared with a bunch of cookies. I had to physically ban the milk, since we were scheduled to be away for over 3 weeks. ("Huh? I Changed my mind" – the daughter shrugs her shoulders when quizzed about the change in list contents!) IF I were Santa, I would have stuck around and shrugged my shoulder too, but he didn’t. He was very accommodative of requests procuring items from the local markets at short notice.

2) The location changed. There was a large Christmas tree with an updated list and a post script saying, "Santa: We will be in Chennai for Christmas for this year." I mean. What?

A number of questions arose in my mind. First of all India is ahead of us in timing. So, technically, by the time he read the note and zipped past time-zones, he would already have been late, but he wasn’t!

The daughter and her cousins spent all afternoon on 24th cutting up pieces of paper and coloring them to be Christmas tree and decorating them with stickers and bindis. Santa behaved admirably and left the gifts for them under make-shift paper trees that made for endless days of fun.

Happy New Year!

(Image from Google Search)