Christmas! Christmas! CHRISTMAS!

We went to Santaland at Macy's. Word of advice: get express passes the day before through the Macy's app, you'll only have to wait half an hour.  That's right, the express line is still half an hour. The regular line was 2 hours and 20 min, no lie.

And a good portion of the people standing in that line weren't children. There were young couples waiting to get Christmas card photos of themselves with Santa, entire families with teenaged children,  and any number of middle aged couples from Long Island or the outer boroughs who must have been doing it every year since they were kids and somehow just forgot to stop coming.

They all waited over 2 hours for the joy of sitting on the lap of one of 7 or 8 different Santas hanging out in enclosed plywood rooms, sitting on thrones carved with reindeer heads and attended by underemployed theater school grads dressed as large elves.

And yes, P-roc got nosey and stuck his head in one of the other plywood rooms on our way out, so he now knows for sure that the idea of the One True Santa is a farce.  A fact that he knew loooong ago, he claims, and has been trying to convince us, his gullible parents, of for years.

On the way out, we stopped to check out the window displays, with all their lights and animation and interactive display stuff.  They were pretty cool, but what really impressed I-roc was the moon in the real life sky ("look mommy! Moon! Moon! Mooooooooon!") and P noticed that a small metal statue of an owl in the square across the street had glowing green eyes. "That kind of ruins the statue", he said disdainfully. Everyone's a critic.