Headscratchers / Bad Santa

• Why did a mother even give her crying baby to Willie (the Santa) if her baby is too young to speak? Isn't the Mall Santa for telling him what you want for Christmas?
  • You can just take a picture of Santa holding your baby, like Marcus was trying to sell multiple copies of to the mother at the beginning of the movie.
• Why would a mom bring her son to see Santa when he was in partial costume eating his lunch at the food court. She was a classical Karen.
• Gin's investigation of Willie and Marcus contains a plot hole (at least, potentially). He does some decent detective work to try and figure out if Chipeska's misgivings about Willie are justified (which they prove to be), but what doesn't make sense is that after his conversation with Thurman's dad but before he confronts Willie and Marcus, he figures out that they're professional thieves. The plot hole is that when recapping what he knows to Willie and Marcus, he recaps the general modus operandi of their annual heists and then mentions that up until now, they've never been caught. The only thing I can think of to explain it is that maybe he was just taking a guess by cross-referencing malls they worked at with reported post-Christmas Eve robberies, but even then, that's just making assumptions without any actual in-universe proof to it (like no footage of them, no arrest records, etc.). Still, if they were never caught, then how would he have known about them and their plans? Am I missing something or did the writer(s)?
  • On that note, how did none of the previous malls Willie and Marcus robbed connect the dots between them having worked there and being cleaned out on Christmas Eve?
  • Slagel did say their names changed with each job (along with the locale). Maybe they just happened to use their real names on this one, after having used assumed ones for the last few jobs?