Sorry Santa

It was a typical day in my early years. It was the day before Christmas break and our kindergarten teacher, Ms. Olds, told the class that she had a special visitor coming in to class that day. Soon after that, in walked a big man dressed in a red suite and he had a great white beard hanging down from his chin. Thanks to older siblings in my family, I had already known the truth as to who really placed those presents under the tree on Christmas. Being so young, most of my classmates who still believed in this fraud thought he was totally legit. Well, they were about to get a very rude awakening. On TV I had seen clips of children at malls who were sitting on “Santa’s” lap and pulled down his beard. I made my way closer and closer to the unsuspecting man dressed in red. I reached for the long white beard hanging from his chin. I grabbed it, pulled it way down, and then let it go. It snapped back up to his face and covered his eyes. It made a pretty loud noise, like one you hear when someone snaps you with a rubber band. The whole class was shocked as to what just happened. I heard a few laughs and a few gasping noises coming from the kids in my class and the teachers in the room. The Santa Clause left the room immediately and the teachers began trying to calm down a bunch of confused little kids. They tried to come up with a cover story on how he was one of Santa’s helpers and that Santa was up in the sky watching or something. I sat in the back of the room with a smirk on my face listening to what they were trying to tell the kids. Then I was pulled into the hallway and my teacher told me that I had done something wrong, but I didn’t really get yelled at. A few teachers gathered together and began calling the parents of the children who had been in my class when it happened. They also called my parents and I was a little nervous to go home that day. It turned out that the guy who was dressed up as Santa was my pre-K teacher’s father. I got home and my mom took the news with more humor than anger, after all, I was only in kindergarten.