Page 6 of Mistletoe Face Off

She looks up at me and I see that look on her face that always tugs at my heartstrings. The scared one. The one that means she’s finding this all too much. “Can we go home now, Mommy?”

“But we only just got here. Can’t you go enjoy some of the fun Christmas activities they’ve got going on? Look, there’s a coloring station over there. You love to color.”

“But I want to go home,” she repeats.

I crouch down beside her, engulfing her in a reassuring hug. “You know Mommy’s got to work, honey, but I promise we won’t be too long.”

“But I don’t like it here,” she says, her voice muffled by my jacket.

Thinking of the muscled visitor from the North Pole I captured with my camera, I reply, “Santa’s here, and I know how much you love him.”

“He is?” Her eyes are alight, huge in her face, as she pulls her head out from my jacket. “Is it the real Santa? Because sometimes they’re someone pretending to be Santa.”

“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see to find out,” I reply with a smile.

I can almost see the cogs in her mind whirring as she works out whether it's the real Santa or otherwise coming, and if it's actually worth staying for. The thing is, she doesn't have a choice. With my ex lumbering her with me at the last minute despite the fact I'm working, it's either here with me at the Community Center, or here with me at the Community Center.

That’s what you get when you parent on your own approximately 99.9% of the time.

Did I mention my ex is a prize jerk? Because I bet he’s got a whole shelf full of prize jerk trophies by now. Combine that with the fact that I'm doing my job reporting on the Chicago Blizzard hockey team’s involvement here today as well as my photographers job, I've more than got my hands full this afternoon. Not to mention the fact I have to interview a bunch of too-big-for-their-boots hockey pros—my least favorite kind of guy on the planet—trying to get an angle beyond the sporting platitudes they always throw at me for my story.

“Okay. I guess we can stay,” Macy replies on a sigh that sounds so much more grown up than her eight years.

“Attagirl,” I say with a kiss to her forehead. “Hey, do you want to go get your face painted?” I ask, gesturing at a station where volunteers are painting kid’s faces. “You could be an elf?”

Her lips lift into a smile. “Can I be a figure skater instead?”

“Of course you can, honey,” I reply, wondering exactly what brief I could give a face painter to transform my eight year old daughter into a figure skater.

I shouldn’t be surprised that’s what she wants to look like. Macy has loved figure skating her whole life, right from the first time I took her to see Disney on Ice when she was only two years old. Since then, she's practiced the moves in our living room and watched endless YouTube clips for technique, but she's never actually got on the ice. I know, right? She’s a figure skater without skates.

The thing is, her anxiety gets too much for her when she’s faced with actually stepping out onto the ice, and try as I might to encourage her to at least give it a shot, she always shies away. It breaks my heart. The one thing she would love to do is the biggest thing she's so desperately afraid of.

I take Macy’s hand and we make our way through the throngs of people involved in activities such as cookie decorating, coloring pictures of Santa and his reindeer, and a snowball tossing game, involving soft white balls made to look like snowballs. It might be snowing outside on this chilly late-November Chicago day, but there's no way the organizers of this event would want actual snow in here.

One of the face painting volunteers, a woman about my mom’s age with curly blonde hair, looks up at us with a broad smile. “Hey there, sweetheart. Do you want your face painted like an elf?”

Macy shakes her head but no words come out.

“My daughter, Macy, would like to be a figure skater, please, if you could manage that?” I ask.

The woman pinches her brows together momentarily before her face breaks out into a fresh smile. “Of course we can manage that. I will make you into the prettiest figure skater in the whole Community Center.”

“What do you think, honey?” I ask.

Macy presses her lips together and nods in response.

“All right. How about we get you sitting your figure skating self down over here on this stool and I'll get right to work,” the woman says kindly.

I shoot her a grateful smile. “I've got to go interview some people then take a few shots for the paper I work for. Is it okay if I leave Macy here with you for a while? I won’t be long.”

“Of course it is,” she replies. “I'm Margaret.”

“Nice to meet you, Margaret. This is Macy, and I'm Holly.”

“Holly? Well, aren't you in the right place at the right time?” she says on a laugh, and I give her a smile. I get that joke about my name approximately seventeen times a day at this time of year, people always thinking they're being so original.

They're not.

---