Picture Day

Sounds strange picture day for a Mall Santa. It was an early day for Santa as it photo day for Team Plaza Bonita. They have a real professional photographer come in before the Center opens and they take group photos with Santa. It starts with everyone who can show up for the morning photo. As in the above photo there are only 26 of the 68 team members. There are a lot of people doing things here to maintain a Center that is always clean and comfortable to walk into.

And just as luck would have it the standard for the day was #10. Take pride in your personal appearance. Everyone is responsible for projecting a professional image by following the Westfield Style Guide (uniform and appearance specifications). It is a good thing for Santa that the Westfield color is Red. I think that puts me into the correct style guide.

During warm up this morning several groups of my special friends came into the Center and when they saw Santa there was no hesitation they came right up to me. Like I have said in the past I try not to interrupt the warm up with these extra Santa greetings. This morning though I did not see them coming, and the whole Plaza Bonita team welcomed them to WOW while I was able to say Hello to all of them and invited them to the Santa set a little later. I suggested to their teacher that they might want to walk around the Center for awhile first though. I had 2 different groups of mommy & Me waiting for me this morning, as it turned out it was around 35 children. Before noon I had over 50 visits.

Hershey Chocolate is doing a promotion with candy bar flavored cookies. So there was some special decorating going on so that this can all be displayed on the Santa Set. One of those people helping to decorate cookies for this was 11 yr. Old Sara. The reason I mention her is that too many 11 year olds quit believing in Santa and it is such a great loss to a child's innocence. Sara had a conversation with her mom that was shared with me about how her cousins do not believe, her mom asked her the perfect question, what to you believe? She told her mom that she believed in Santa, that is good maybe we would not all be so hard core if we had been able to maintain that belief as we were growing up. So Sara always remember that the true magic and spirit of Christmas lies in your heart.

That sure keeps this Santa going all year round. I tried to enlarge this photo and it did not really work in this format. I will attempt to add photos by departments in the future

So now the countdown really gets going only 16 days til Christmas visits today were 129 with a total to date for the season of 2,532.