Well the Santa job was a lot of fun. As expected the mothers from the apartment complex were very thorough. They sent a couple of moms over to make sure I was awake 30 minutes before game time, and then they sent some five minutes before to look over the costume and escort me over there.<\/p>\n
When I got there I waited outside a black curtain, and when the moment came I stepped out into a group of 30 or so suitably surprised kids. I walked over to the front with a couple of “Merry Christmas”‘s and “Ho Ho HO!”‘s. Once I got to the front of everyone, they had a Santa Claus Q&A session. That was a first for me – I wasn’t expected to be grilled by little kids in Japanese. <\/p>\n
The age range of the kids varied a lot, but everyone seemed to be in elementary school. The questions were fun – “Are you single?” “How do reindeers fly?” “Where are your reindeer right now?” “How did you get here?” “How do you get into the houses?” <\/p>\n
I did my best in Japanese and I think everyone understood. It was pretty fun. Then they had each kid come up and get a present from me. I read out the name, and then the kid would come up, snatch the present, and run for it. The organizers wanted to get a picture with each one, so they would have to go chase down the kid who was already tearing into his or her gift. <\/p>\n
It made for a long gift delivery session. Each kid took the present and ran, and then everyone would scramble to gather them up and bring them up to stand next to me. I would smile and wave, but I had so much fake hair on my face I don’t think anyone noticed.<\/p>\n
After still more pictures we sang “Silent Night” in Japanese (I faked it). Then they ushered me out of there and I was back in my civilian clothes in 20 minutes. Thanks to double sided tape I lost quite a bit of eyebrow hair, but overall it was a success. Too much fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well the Santa job was a lot of fun. As expected the mothers from the apartment complex were very thorough. They sent a couple of moms over to make sure I was awake 30 minutes before game time, and then they sent some five minutes before to look over the costume and escort me over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-ec","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}