My son has a fear of dressed up people.
The first memorable incident happened at a children’s festival where a man was dressed up as a St Kilda football club mascot. He had an oversized foam head and a pointy chin. My two-year-old son sat on my lap, crying, shaking, distressed, craning his head back, trying to keep an eye on the perpetrator, repeatedly saying ‘where’s the man?’ I put it down to my son being overtired and having had too much sugar.
But these sorts of incidents kept happening. At my daughter’s kindergarten break-up party, Santa Claus arrived wearing a white beard and ringing a bell. My son was so distraught we had to leave the room. Last year, three months before his 3-year-old kindergarten break-up party, he started fretting, ‘will Santa be there, will Santa be there?’ I told him yes, probably, Santa will be there, but we don’t have to meet him. He asked about it so much that I decided to speak to his teacher, to see if we could somehow manage the situation. I didn’t want my son not participating in the end of year performance because he was fretting about the arrival of Santa.
The teacher told me that after Silent Night was sung, we’d hear some bells, and Santa would appear. We had it all planned out, after Silent Night I’d swing in, collect my son, and escape outdoors before the big guy arrived. However, it went a little wrong, no one told me which direction Santa would be coming from, and as we tried to dart through the toilets, there was Santa, big, red and round, and very dressed up. It was like finding myself in a horror movie with my son, the very person we were trying to escape from was the person we’d bumped into. Needless to say, we turned around and ran through the audience, as well-meaning parents were shouting ‘wait, wait, Santa is coming!’ We continued to flee.