Expensive Santa

One of the things our Village does is bring Santa around on the fire truck (here the small suburb cities are called Villages, even though they look nothing like the village in Beauty & the Beast or M. Night Shyamalan's movie). One of Santa's stops is our street corner, so we planned our Saturday morning so we could go outside right before Santa's scheduled arrival. Santa passed out a bag of treats to each of the kids, which included the driest orange ever, a PEZ dispenser, and some other candy. Henry loves PEZ, but not dry oranges.

So, while this was fun and cute (even if Henry remains unimpressed), the Grinch in me is going "How much does this cost??!? Is this one of the reasons our property and sales taxes are so ridiculously high?" Santa was on a fire engine, with a few other firemen, plus there were at least two support vehicles (with multiple people in each vehicle) that shut down the road for Santa's stop. Is the village paying all these people overtime? What happens if there's a fire right now? You can't have a 10% sales tax with a scheduled increase next quarter, and then waste money on a traveling fireman Santa AND a village party, where Santa also appeared. I'd rather have a rebate on my taxes than Santa come to see me.

This is also the Saturday we experienced our first Christmas miracle. I took a couple to the O'Hare airport so they could travel to Utah for Christmas and see the MoTab Christmas spectacular. After I dropped them off, the wife of the couple called and said her ID was at home. I looped back to the airport, picked her up and headed home to pick up her wallet. We had just about an hour until her flight time, and it's taken me more than one hour to go one-way to O'Hare before. We made good time, but it was still too slow to make it. The plan was she would keep trying until she knew there was absolutely no way she could get on the plane. We returned to the airport with about 5 or so minutes until her scheduled flight, but her plane was delayed 15 minutes, so they hadn't even boarded yet. It was a Christmas miracle! Except it was Delta, so you kind of expect them to be late anyway. And Delta had given a total of three couples tickets for the same two seats, so maybe the real Christmas miracle was that my friend and her husband didn't get bumped off the plane.