GiGi Diaz, Hialeah Hottie from Santa's Enchanted Forest All Grown Up

There's only one place in Miami to find Games! Food! Show! Nativity! and that's at Santa's Enchanted Forest at Tropical Park. The amusement park fun starts at 5 p.m. tonight, and runs through January 2, but we're not going. A few years ago, four carnies and a security guard escorted...

By Victor Gonzalez

November 4, 2010

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There's only one place in Miami to find Games! Food! Show! Nativity! and that's at Santa's Enchanted Forest at Tropical Park. The amusement park fun starts at 5 p.m. tonight, and runs through January 2, but we're not going.

A few years ago, four carnies and a security guard escorted us off carnival grounds for "allegedly" telling Santa to go fuck himself. The incident was a complete misunderstanding, but landed us on the SEF blacklist. We were devastated, to say the least. Without questionably safe carnival rides and deep fried, sugar-coated fair food, Christmas is just another stupid, commercial holiday.

So how do we get our Santa's Enchanted Forest fix? Via it's glorious commercial that we're about to make viral. Below we checked in with star of the commercial, Hialeah's GiGi Diaz, to see what's she's been up to in the past nine years.

Diaz is the young lady behind the catchiest local-access television spot since, Maroone's "Who you gonna' call?" campaign. For the better part of a decade, Diaz's commercials (one in English y otro en Español) have served as Miami's reminder that Holiday season has arrived.

As the crack team of investigative journalists we are, we tracked Diaz down and asked her about post-jingle life. "(The commercial's) a fun memory," she told us. "People still recognize my face."

She's 24 years old now, and owns two performing arts studios in Hialeah, dubbed GiGi's Academy. "I opened the first one in 2003, and the second one in October of last year," she says. In addition to teaching modeling, dance and acting, Diaz also provides live, trackside harness racing coverage at Isle Casino in Pompano Park, and hosts Miami Hoy, a television show on channel 590 (Comcast Digital Cable). But even with an impressive post-jingle resume, the Miami mini-media mogul appreciates what Santa's did for her. "Everything you do professionally, serves as a stepping stone."

GiGi Diaz, the next Cristina Saralegui? Maybe.

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