Forty Minutes in the Queue and He Will Not Look at the Man

You queued. You paid. You got the good slot, the one before nap, because you are not an amateur.

And now there is a two year old welded to your collarbone with his face in your neck, and a man in a red suit is doing a very kind, very determined ho ho ho about four feet away, and everybody in the grotto is watching to see what you do next.

Which is a strange thing to remember while a photographer counts down from three.

What he is actually reacting to

Almost never Santa specifically. Take the same man, put him in jeans in your kitchen, and most toddlers are fine within ten minutes.

It is everything around him that stacks up. The queue was long. The coat has been on indoors for half an hour, so he is hot and cross before anything even starts. The room is loud in a very particular way: music, other people’s children, and a photographer talking over both.

Then there is the beard. Toddlers read faces to work out whether a person is safe, and most of this one is missing. And the last thing he hears is you, telling him to go and sit on a stranger by himself. All year you have told him the opposite.

Put like that, the crying makes sense. He is checking with you first, which is what a close, well settled toddler is built to do. The wobble is the system working. It is not the system failing.

That cuts both ways, and it is the best tool you have. Toddlers look at your face to decide how scared to be. If you are braced, apologising, or bargaining in a tight voice, he reads it as proof that something here is wrong.

The version that works

Go early or go late, never at the busiest hour, and take the coat off in the queue. Overheating in a snowsuit indoors accounts for more grotto meltdowns than fear does, and it is the one thing here you fully control.

Then lower the ask. You are not after the lap photo. You are after close enough, with no pressure on him.

There is a ladder to it. Look from across the room. Wave from ten feet. Stand nearby while you talk to Santa. Sit on your lap next to him. The classic pose is the top rung, and most families get two rungs higher next year by not forcing it this year.

Talk to Santa yourself while you hold your child. Ask him something dull about the weather. Watching you have a boring chat with this man tells your toddler the one thing he needs to know, which is that the man is ordinary.

And if the room itself is the problem rather than the man, treat it as a noise and crowd issue and plan accordingly. That is the same set of adjustments that makes the rest of December survivable for a child who runs hot on sensory input.

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What not to do in the moment

Also skip the bribe. Sweets in exchange for sitting on the lap turn a slightly scary thing into a slightly scary thing with a price on it, and toddlers are excellent at spotting that the price means the thing is bad. It is the same trap as the reward that quietly tells a child the task is not worth doing.

When it is more than the grotto

Most of this fades by three or four. Words arrive, the world gets easier to predict, and the beard stops mattering.

What is worth a closer look is fear that has slipped its situation. A child who will not enter any shop with decorations up. One who wakes at night about it. One who has gone wary of aunts and neighbours too, since the autumn.

That is a different conversation from one bad grotto trip. Raise it with your health visitor or doctor rather than waiting it out. Fear in very young children hardly ever looks like fear. It often arrives as temper, which we have unpicked in the piece on anger that is really worry.

For everybody else the plan is short. Fewer layers. A quieter hour. No lap. Your face relaxed.

What to do with the rest of the trip

Buy the cocoa. Look at the lights. Let him watch the whole thing from your hip. A market at dusk is a good outing for a two year old even if the grotto is a write off, as long as you treat the grotto as the optional part rather than the reason you came.

It helps to have one thing planned after it that he definitely likes, so the trip does not end on the hard bit. Ours is the same every year and costs nothing, which is roughly the argument in the piece on the traditions that cost nothing.

Go home before he is finished rather than after. A short good trip beats a long one that ended badly, and it is the thing that gets you a yes next December. The same logic runs through the small daily bits of December, where less turns out to be the whole trick.

We came home without a photo two years running. The third year she walked over on her own and told him about a dinosaur for a full minute while I stood there like a lemon.