Listen, I know your kid is an absolute angel, a downright sweetie. See that blond boy screaming his head off like the world is ending and he’s sitting on the lap of the man responsible for the apocalypse? That’s Reid,* and I know as a matter of fact that he is an adorable child when not sitting on Santa Claus’ lap at a Minnesota mall. But get the Big Man involved and plenty of your children (or you, in your diapered years) will turn into red-faced banshees with one goal in mind: “Get. Me. Off. This. Guy’s. Lap.”

So that’s the premise of a little project we’d like to try — while some children sit sweetly and smile for Santa, plenty of others go into complete meltdown mode. And since we here at Consumerist aren’t the sort to seek out saccharine smiles, we’ve got a request for you this holiday season: Send us your best pics of your own children (no one else’s offpspring, srsly, mkay?) or yourself when you were a wee one melting down with the man.

Yes, we know, this has been done before elsewhere on the Internets. Which will make it even easier to find you out if you try to swap in a stranger for your own flesh and blood so again, do not do that.

We’ll be collecting photos for the weeks leading up to Christmas itself, so send’em our way with the subject line SANTA IS SCARY to tips@consumerist.com or directly to me at quirk@consumerist.com along with a brief description of where the photo was taken and your child’s name. We will only use first names, so your child won’t be findable elsewhere on the Internets.

Look at it this way — your kid expended a lot of energy in that meltdown, so why celebrate it?

*Reid is not my child, he’s the son of a lifelong best friend and the inspiration for this little project. And yes, he really is quite adorable on a regular basis.

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