Santa and the world we live in

Considering Katy's recent extreme stranger anxiety, I knew that getting a picture of her with Santa would be a challenge. And although I didn't want to cause undue emotional harm to my child, I also really didn't want to skip a year. My mom has a picture of me as a kid every year with Santa, and I remember enjoying looking at them when I got older. Besides, crying Santa pictures are a rite of passage, right?

Well, in preparation, I had taken Katy twice to observe Santa from a distance: "Look! There's Santa! Doesn't he look like a nice guy? Look at all those kids sitting on his lap! Wouldn't you like to sit on his lap?" She was quietly respectful and somewhat interested. But actually approaching Santa - let alone sitting on his lap - that's a different story. So I guess I wimped out. I couldn't hand her over to a stranger and make her scream, so this is the best I could do:

At least the bench was large enough to accommodate the three of them...

I suppose for future reference I could do some creative cropping...

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So the past few days have been somewhat stressful and dramatic. My sister Melanie is on break from school, but decided to stay in town for a while to work. She lives fairly close by in a house with 5 other girls. All these girls were leaving to go home, so Mel came to crash at our house rather than stay over there by herself. And good thing she did... within 48 hours of them leaving for break, someone broke into their house and completely ransacked the place. I've never heard of such a break in. They clearly knew the girls were gone for break, because they must've been there for hours. They were very selective in what they took. Only the best printers, the highest quality brand computer, clothes from the taller girls, etc. They searched every drawer to find the valuables. The only thing they weren't selective about was underwear - every pair of that was gone. Mel lost not only her computer, but something much scarier - her lock box that included her SSN card, birth certificate, and passport. Umm...hello? Can you imagine the headache that is associated with replacing these items - without the others? Not only that, but I had no idea all the security freezes and fraud alerts that needed to be put into place when you lose items like these today. Not exactly what you want to be dealing with the week before Christmas.

But what I don't understand the most is...who?...I mean...WHO does this kind of thing? I just cannot imagine the circumstances of life that lead a person to do this to another human being. Complete disregard for another person for my own gain. I just. don't. get it. I feel really sad about the whole thing. I feel that it's a reflection of how broken the world is, how messed up we are. And it makes me angry that we have to be scared of this kind of thing. A family should be able to feel safe. It just isn't fair. Of course, this could lead to a huge philosophical debate about our rights as humans, etc., but really I'm just blowing off steam.

So Melanie's ok. She's safe, not hurt, and doing everything she can to put the pieces back together. But it's upsetting. It'll take a while to move past this one.