Advertisement

Boy who sat on Santa’s lap realizes 13 years later it was his father-in-law

Help for the Holidays looks at an organization that has brought joy and happiness to hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged children in greater Boston: Globe Santa.

Life has a way of coming full-circle sometimes.

Chris Burd, a 27-year-old who lives in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, had one of those moments after his mother noticed that a photograph taken 13 years earlier showed him sitting on the knee of a Santa that looked an awful lot like his fiance's dad, according to ABC News.

Burd was a kid then, of course, and his future father-in-law Elmer Abbas was working as a mall Santa Claus when someone snapped the photo of the boy smiling on Santa's knee with his 3-year-old sister.

Santa's daughter became engaged to Burd in December of last year, just before his own mother began unearthing old pictures for a scrapbook.

[ Related: Maine mall sacks Santa Claus after children, parents complain he is rude ]

"It was just really kind of a strange feeling," Burd told the news network, "I have met him so many times, and then just seeing him in the picture, to realize I had met him 13 years before was definitely weird."

The couple displayed the Santa picture at their wedding next to a childhood photo of the bride sitting on her dad's lap for the amusement of their guests.

Abbas said he's been dressing up as Santa for twenty years. He has a full white beard that's reminiscent of jolly old St. Nick and kids used to tell him all the time how much he looks like him, Abbas said.

But that was the only year Abbas worked as a mall Santa, he said, and the family marveled at the coincidence even more because Chris had just moved to Minnesota from Ohio.

[ Related: Canada Post gets grinchy on letters to Santa, charges child for postage ]

"It was fun to tease my future son-in-law about sitting in his father-in-law's lap. And I think I probably made up a couple of stories about what he wanted for Christmas," Abbas told ABC.

Chris said his father-in-law joked that he remembered a little boy once asked for a beautiful wife.