When our first-born was a baby, I didn’t know how I felt about having Santa visit our house. I discussed it with my husband and close friends. I read articles about it. I hemmed and hawed it. Fortunately, those babies give us time to make such decisions. One of the best pieces of advice I got was that if we did choose to have Santa and the Easter Bunny in our home, we should make a game of it in other times and “play” that we are these characters.
By the time our girl was nearing two, I was giddy with excitement to see her reaction to a visit from St. Nicholas. Apparently, the decision had been made. She took on the “play” element with zero prompting from us. On holidays, we are each instructed by our little director when it’s our turn to “be” Santa, or whomever has recently stopped by.
Now, we have no less than 7! magical visitors. (How did that happen?) And while I’d made all sorts of promises to keep it simple and not add to the deception, there are definitely ways I have lapsed on this. Everyone has their own forms of this, of course; I mean if you’re going to do it, you might as well have some fun, right? While we don’t do any footprints or costumes or ringing bells, we definitely have gone farther than I had planned. I had hoped to reflect any questions about these visitors back to our daughter. “How do YOU think Santa gets down the chimney?” etc. And while I usually keep to this rule in person, everything changes when the questions are asked in a direct letter; those magical visitors can’t help but answer. So now, each visitor has quite an elaborate backstory, which is a combination of our daughter’s long list of questions and her mama’s excitement. And, as our girl is beginning her reading and writing journey, I couldn’t just have these visitors write their letters in recognizable print. So, while I’d love these letters to be handwritten, they are way too lengthy to do so in special writing. Thus was born our Magical Visitors’ Fonts.
I am fortunate to have an incredible stock of scrapbook paper, and after researching some fonts, here’s what we’ve got:
Our leprechauns and their font (They actually do handwrite this font with green whiteboard marker on mirrors and tubs.)
Our Easter Bunny and her font
Our Switch Witch and her font
Our St. Nicholas and his font
Our Christmas Kindness Elf and her font
Our Santa and his font
Our Tooth Fairy and her font (She originally had a different font, but she writes so very tiny that it had to be changed.)
I hope some of these links can help another mama or dada who might be in a pickle trying to figure some of this out!
You might also like:
Switch Witch
Tooth Fairy
Christmas Kindness Elf
St. Nicholas
Leprechauns
A New Holiday Helper