Tropical Santa Cosplay Time

Every year my dad dresses up to play Santa in his Illinois town. This year, to my general dismay, I joined his taste in santa-wear and dressed up as the jolly man himself (Santa, although my dad's pretty jolly, too!) to bring guava and yoghurt flavored candy to the children of Song Lo Primary School.

Let's just say that it was real, real hot, and that they should wash that santa suit after I sweat all over it. This is not a forgiving climate for wearing fur!

Also, check out my ridiculous sandals. Santa went tropical this year. Forget that boots nonsense: when Santa is in Rome...!

At left is a picture of me with my cooperating teacher (the regular English teacher, who magically becomes my TA when I'm there). She's really great, and we have good first grade classrooms together. They're sometimes so smart it's scary!

Click through for a photo album of Santa's trip to Phu Nhuan District...

This school is grades 1-5 (the typical Primary school grades here in Vietnam). I had a golden bell and half a voice... which I pretty much wrecked by the time I was done in an hour and fifteen minutes. I made as much racket as I possibly could - it's my duty as a foreigner!

This was towards the end. At this point I was basically like, "take all this stupid candy and get me out of this suit before I melt. MACH SCHNELL, MEINE KINDER... MACH SCHNELL!"

I traveled to every classroom in the school building to hand out candy from my magic golden sack and spread holiday cheer (great tidings, good news, guava candy, etc... you know). Every class sung me "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and I'm 80% positive I was not paying attention to anything by about the 45 minute mark.

Literally the only thing that succeeded in getting my attention towards the end of my holiday tour was the classroom celebrating Christmas with buckets and buckets of fried chicken from KFC. Santa had a grumbly tummy! Not fair!

We finished up in the English computer lab, where we sang an extremely long and psychotically amped-up version of Jingle Bells and took roughly 50 pictures.

All in all, a pretty fun way to ring in the holidays for one of my favorite schools! The suit is hot, but no one can deny that I've got the rockin' Santa Body for this. ;) New Year's Resolution number 1: lose enough weight that I don't get invited to do this next year!

After all, who wants a trim Santa?