George Clooney [1] is a hilarious celebrity dad with a slew of unrelatable parenting problems, like the fact that his 3-year-old twins [2] with wife Amal — Ella and Alexander — speak fluent Italian [3] thanks to summers spent at their gorgeous villa on Lake Como. And now that the family are quarantining for two weeks at their home in the UK, where they flew for a drive-in movie premiere, the twins are taking to British English, referring to the trunks of cars as boots and sweaters as jumpers.
One relatable parenting issue George is having, however? Having to pretend he's talking to Santa Claus as a way to keep his kids' behavior in line. In a virtual interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert [4], the dad of two shared his holiday parenting tactic, which may look fairly identical to that of a lot of other parents out there.
"At 3 years old you're just trying to keep your kids in line in general," George told Stephen, who added that anyone who thinks the terrible twos are bad hasn't had a 3-year-old. George went on: "So I devised a way to get them to behave. . . . When they're asleep in the morning and then I can hear them start — they sleep in the same bedroom — they start to make noises and it gets really fighty, you can hear the two of them getting at each other or something. And I stand outside the door, and I go, 'Oh, hey, hi, Santa!' And then you hear Santa is there, he's like, 'Ho, ho, ho!'"
George continued his Santa impression, saying that Saint Nick will announce out loud that he's just checking in to make sure the kids are being good. "And you can hear them saying: 'We are, Santa! We are!' . . . And then he leaves and they come out, and they're unbelievably well-behaved."
Whether you utilize phone calls to "Santa" or your kids' Elf on the Shelf reports back to the North Pole, there's no denying that December parenting gets a *bit* easier when you can use the impending holidays and various magical characters to your advantage. George is fully committed to his Santa impression, that's for sure, but once Christmas is over, he's not too sure what kinds of holiday-related behavior tactics will be at his disposal.
"I'm worried about the Easter Bunny," he joked, "because I'm not sure what he sounds like."