Unless you have very small children, or are really into trains, you may be surprised to learn that the Polar Express, that dead-eyed animated Tom Hanks movie based on the book with the same name, is a huge holiday classic. It's such a classic, the evil geniuses at Warner Brothers have created a way for families to overextend their holiday budgets on the opportunity to ride the real Polar Express to see the real Santa Claus at the real North Pole. Since my three-year-old son falls exactly in the target demographic those bastards are after, our family booked ourselves four tickets in coach because, yes, even the Polar Express is divided by class.
We arrived at Union Station to ride the train on a Thursday afternoon. Going to the North Pole to visit Santa is kind of expensive, and if you do so while the sun is still out, it’s cheaper. We briefly waited in a loud and lively line, sizing up the other exhausted parents and their children. Some families were wearing matching pajamas, successfully communicating their dominance of tender love and togetherness over the rest of us. Technically, I was also wearing my pajamas, as I sometimes will just go straight to bed in my belt and jeans like a psycho. But I digress.
From there we were led into a Christmas activity hall that had things like coloring stations, a gift shop, and the Polar Express movie playing on a big screen saddling some of these kids with unrealistic expectations. One of the kids in there was wearing the exact same pajamas as the little boy from the movie. I thought maybe he looked slightly too old to be visiting Santa, and I must have been making a face that reflected that, because he caught my glance and gave me a really dirty look that made me feel like a jerk. This feeling went away when we were herded into the holding area in front of the train, and he turned out to be part of some skit where he talks to the conductor about getting on the Polar Express. Little brat.
We were escorted to our socioeconomic-specific train car where we found a wrapped cookie and a napkin waiting for us …. on a seat that people put their butts on. The interior was beautifully decorated with garlands, lights, tinsel and other Christmasy-looking shit. While we waited for everyone else to board, a frantically up-tempo song tunelessly yelled at us by Tom Hanks blasted in our ears on an endless loop as if we were being interrogated by the CIA. Graciously it stopped once the train started moving.
Our ride to the North Pole featured various bits of entertainment. There were Christmas carol sing-a-longs, a recording of the Polar Express book being read by the author, and more tone-deaf shouting from Tom Hanks while performers in chef hats handed out hot chocolate. The chef hat people were honestly top-notch. They were generally in charge of the Christmas cheer on each car, making sure the children were engaged and having a great time, and they did an excellent job. They somehow were able to generate an impossible amount of enthusiasm in a situation I assume they actually had very little for, like the people who work at Chick-Fil-A.
After roughly 25 minutes of traveling up to speeds of about 4 miles an hour, we finally reached the North Pole. I watched my three-year-old son puzzlingly look out the window at Santa’s headquarters, which appeared to be mostly comprised of two-dimensional cardboard houses and Christmas lights from Target, with Santa himself dancing and waving at us from in front of his structurally-unsound wonderland.
“I want to get out,” my son said to me. “Like in the movie.”
This desire was quickly stamped out as our train slowly crept past the North Pole and towards the brick remnants of a massive factory that looked like it had maybe exploded. My son turned to me somewhat alarmed, not entirely sure what he was looking at, and in a moment of completely unconfident parenting I just kind of shrugged and said, “It’s fine.”
Perhaps sensing the concern among the train that the North Pole had recently been under attack, Santa reassuringly appeared in our car and went around greeting all the children. He asked my son what he wanted for Christmas in which he replied “a choo-choo train,” but Santa didn’t hear him because some other kid with one of those new weird names like Clayden or something kept interrupting. Santa eventually forgot my son was even there because Clayden wouldn’t shut up. This was, of course, not Clayden’s fault, but the fault of his stupid parents who learned all of their rearing techniques from Instagram, and who sat idly by recording the interaction on their phone while wearing their dumb matching pajamas. This was after the whole train had sung happy birthday to their kid too. Just entirely too much Clayden. Would not recommend.
Once Santa finished talking to Clayden, he said goodbye and hid in the bathroom for the rest of the trip (probably). The chef hat performers led the children in a conga line through the aisle which was actually pretty adorable. Meanwhile, some of the adults looked out the window bearing witness to the forgotten parts of their city, the parts that resemble a post-apocalyptic movie, complete with plywood shanties and trash barrel fires, making one briefly grateful for a life that provides them with the opportunity to be slightly annoyed by a Christmas train for children.
This sentiment immediately went away once we were back in the parking lot, fighting for our lives to beat the rest of the families rushing to their cars to avoid having to wait at the payment gate for a few extra minutes. In a Christmas miracle, the Union Station lot workers allowed us to leave for free (hooray!), just so we could sit in the height of rush hour holiday traffic.
And even though it's now been nearly a week since I rode on the Polar Express, and others can no longer hear its sweet sound, Tom Hanks’ voice still screams at me in my head, as it does for all who truly believe.
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