Taking Santa Pictures at the Fischer Hanlon House

Fischer Hanlon House- 1856 Historic Home and one-time
boarding house

As a little girl I remember when mom and dad would take Katie and I to the Fischer Hanlon House in town to get hot apple cider off the wood burning stove and sit down with "THE REAL" Santa Claus (because he had a real beard) and tell him our wish lists for Christmas. I feel like we were dressed up in our best Christmas outfits (maybe?) and dad would take pictures and we would get a candy cane after we were done. I remember really looking forward to that time. I found out this year that they are still doing Santa visits at the Fischer Hanlon house! You know I had to drag the kids their immediately to get their picture taken with Santa and see if they were still doing the apple cider in the kitchen. When I say immediately, I mean immediately. We were downtown at the Christmas parade (just found out about that this year) and were walking by the Capitol and I saw the sign for "Santa at the Fischer Hanlon House" and told Aaron- "Let's go!"  Luckily I had the kids dressed up in Christmas-appropriate attire and we had brought the camera with us.  It was about a 20 minute wait and I ate up everyone of those 20 minutes reminising about how we used to come there as kids and now my kids were getting to share in the tradition - how neat!  The cider was still brewing on the wood burning stove, the volunteers were dressed up in late 19th century attire and when we made in to see Santa Claus (and Mrs. Claus as it was) he was "real" too!
You all know how timid our little Elijah is (e.g. not getting on the choo choo trains, taking 45 minutes to decide a bounce house was ok to get in, etc) so I didn't have high hopes for him to sit on Santa's lap. Lucas on the other hand I figured would be a breeze (and was). So when I successfully got Elijah on Santa's lap (with lots of help from Santa and his bag of goodies) and literally creeped away so Aaron could be a quick shutterfly, I was ecstatic!  Happy Santa Pictures?! ALRIGHT!  Here are some pictures from that day.