EC's Visit with "Father Christmas"

Every year we try to get a picture with Santa. Jones's mom has pictures of her kids with Santa from every year of their childhoods. She sets them out on the mantel in a row from youngest to oldest. It's really cute to see the boys grow up in that way! I love the idea.
Well, this year, we are in a foreign country, and they call Santa, "Father Christmas." We asked around to see where you could go visit Santa, and I heard that they had one at Oxford Castle. Oxford Castle was at one time a fortress,then a prison, and now is a tourist attraction. They have a German Christmas Fair there right now which is very small in scale to the German Christmas fairs in Germany, but still fun to visit. They have all these wooden shacks with vendors selling things like ornaments, crafts, sausages, hot cider, mulled wine, roasted chestnuts, etc.
We decided to visit Santa on Saturday with our friends, the Poages and the Ellistons. We meandered through the Christmas fair and followed the signs for Santa's Grotto. I was expecting something like what you see at any American shopping mall--a big decorated red velvet chair with Santa sitting in it, welcoming boys and girls to come tell him what they want for Christmas. What we found was another wooden shack with a curtain drawn. A girl dressed up in a Christmas tree costume informed us that it cost 5 pounds to enter, which included a goody bag and facepainting. EC was first out of our group to go in. I left A in the stroller, as he had just woken up, and I thought he might freak out if I handed him to Santa. EC went into the curtain and there sat Santa on a folding chair. EC sat next to him on a crate of clementines that had been covered in a wool blanket. Then, everything went downhill the moment Santa opened his mouth.
This Santa was not some retiree who grew out his beard and made 20 grand imitating Santa every year. This was a man with a thick accent who hardly understood English, let alone his role as Santa. He asked EC some odd questions, and she went off on some 4 year old tangents, but he never wrapped the conversation up. He never really asked her what she wanted for Christmas or if she had been a good girl. He DID mention that he would tell "the real Father Christmas" that she didn't have a chimney. I was so annoyed that he ruined the whole charade, but EC didn't seem to notice. I think she couldn't understand his accent well enough to make out what he said. I hustled her back out into the sunshine, and the rest of the kids in our group were too freaked out to enter the "grotto." I told their moms that they weren't missing much.
We had paid our 5 pounds, so we stood in line for the obligatory face painting. That's becoming quite the English tradition. It seems to happen everywhere we go. As we were waiting, some teenagers/young 20-somethings were getting their faces painted. There were 2 girls getting a tiger face and spiderman. The tiger girl had a "hand-rolled cigarette" in her mouth the whole time, and she proceeded to light it up as her friend got her spiderman face painted. Oh, could this experience get any better?
After the facepainting, we got a German sausage on a baguette that was amazing, so all was not a loss! Hopefully the rest of our Christmas experience will not be as colorful as our visit to Santa.