Santa in Oz

Perks of living in Australia include wearing shorts to the Santa Claus Parade. No dredging strollers through the snow, bundling the kids up in their Columbia snowsuits, no freezing your butts off waiting to see a bunch of people bundled up on floats. No, imagine Caribana with Santa as the grand finale…Okay, a slight exaggeration but it was definitely pleasant.
Only the second year that there has been a Santa Claus parade in Melbourne, and our only complaint was that it was a tad on the long side. We met Sam, Ben and Connor at their place in Southbank, parked there, then walked down to Starbucks for a Gingerbread latte (‘tis the season after all) and then headed to the parade. Heaps of characters in costume, a bunch of athletes we don’t know (and their very small babies), a few very elaborate floats, a good amount of spectators but nowhere near the crowds we would have back home. The kids did very well, they enjoyed calling out the names of the characters they knew – Bob the Builder, Elmo and the Sesame Street crew. In Australia, there is a character called Ollie. Same colour as Zoe but male. He is their Elmo, he has his own segments between most children’s shows every day, all day. He starts with “I’m awake. It’s a brand new lovely day.”, then moves on to “Do you know what day it is today?”, he has a few bedtime segments and a bunch of stuff in between. Maddy was very excited to see Elmo and Zoe (Ollie) and this was good since the parade wasn’t moving much by then and they were in front of us for a good 10 minutes.
After 90 minutes, we were itching for Santa to appear so that we could go home. Maddy was already asleep in the stroller, Cooper was close behind, Wyatt kept asking where Santa was…we made it to the conclusion and ended up with some mild sunburns – definitely a first for all of us!