How we became the most hated people visiting Hipster Santa

I’ll preface this with we did absolutely nothing different from anyone else in the line, but ended up with Hipster Santa for over 10 minutes as people in a line around the corner watched after being queued up for so long that they hated anyone in front of them at this point.

I’ll start with the basics – Hipster Santa is in a mall, people come to see him, some people (like us,) make reservations and have around a 30 minute wait, while others show up and wait in a much longer line. The average visit seemed to be about 1-3 minutes depending on number of kids.

We had three kids with us and a baby. This should have been over at four minutes. The line knew this. At eight minutes people were asking who these kids were and why Hipster Santa with his man-bun so high was spending time singing carols with these kids. I was wondering what was going on myself at one point.

At nine minutes you could see daggers in people’s eyes. I could build up a whole lot of tension here, but it was mostly some death looks directed at us, not the kids. So I wasn’t particularly offended or scared for the kids. The parents seemed to know to not direct hate at the Santa.

What had happened was the photo printer broke or ran out of paper. This meant the line was stopped until they got it fixed. We were the ones it broke for. While this was great for the kids as they got to sing song after song I was feeling a bit in danger of attack by parents who had stood in the long line (non-reservation) and now were watching as our party was there with full attention and a whole lot of time.

Eh, it was interesting… Aerin and Maggie got to hang with Hipster Santa, who doesn’t ride a fixie, but a twelve speed it looked like. The guy had tattoo sleeves that said naughty and nice. The seat was made from reclaimed Portland Airport carpet, and to put the nail into the Portland-ity of it, there was a bird on it.

Evidently there was some controversy about this hipster Santa… but he sang with the kids, made the best of a broken photo printer while the elves worked like mad to get things back up and running, and overall it was about the most fun Santa visit we’ve had of the year (I think that was number three).

Considering Santa has evolved from the origins to the current 1940’s? Coca-Cola-drawn fat man in red and white, slight aberrations of the standard are fine unless you have a problem telling your kid that he’s just relaxing and his official Santa suit is over on the coat rack (which it was).

Overall great time other than the fear of death at the hands of parents who were stuck behind us.