Dear Santa
Twas the night before Christmas, when all through GAA land not a creature was stirring trouble, not even Tim O’Leary. And with county convention season at an end, the big man in the red suit was still going through the last letters that had reached him at
Santa, a Chairde
I promise this is the last year I will write to you as I have been advised by Central Council that I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for this lark.
I won’t lie, initially I was a little underwhelmed with last year’s offering after I had requested a Legacy board game but when I stripped away the wrapping all that remained was Snakes and Ladders.
However, after extensive consultations with my elves, I made the best fist of it I could and have redesigned it so that it is now a splitlevel game, with all ladders on one side of the board and all the snakes on the other. It is much tidier and less confusing.
After struggling for a name for it I was thinking of calling it Tier Two, but christen it anything you like – apart from Tommy Murphy.
I know this is an unusual request, but I want nothing from you this year other that you take my redesign and pop it down 32 chimneys. Yours John
Santa, mate
Alright mate, you have always been good to me even though I am a man who wants for little.
Still, I thought it was a nice touch last year to send me a belt but that issue I had keeping my britches up was just a legacy one from my time following the Three Lions.
Truth be told, I tend to have a more pressing wardrobe malfunction these days which is trying to keep the shirt on my back ever since I took up with that Mayo crew.
The thing is, I have €250,000 burning a hole in my back-pocket to give them, but when I requested a receipt for €150,000 from a previous personal donation, they sent me one that pre-dated my gift and seemed to come from a corner shop.
As a result I suggested they may have governance issues but that only made them throw a huff and their response was to serenade me with Brendan Shine’s Shoe the Donkey.
My gut instinct is to get out of this animal farm but I am a reasonable man and am willing to host a peace meeting to find a way forward, however I just want the mood music to be perfect.
Which is why I am writing; you wouldn’t have a copy of Barbara Streisand’s Send in the Clowns lying around? Yours Tim
Santa Claus,
I trust you received our letter of gratitude for last year’s present, which you should have got in good time since we posted it on Christmas Eve.
Well, anyway, thanks again for Kim Jong-Un’s ‘stable government and media strategy in the 21st century’ which was not only a wonderful pageturner but also proved quite useful when we tore a page out of it last month. We hope you don’t think we are being too greedy, but since we have exhausted Brendan Shine’s greatest hits album, we were wondering if we could have Eminem’s Shake that Ass in time for the FBD League.
Oh, and if you have a receipt book with some magic ink that would be mighty. Yours, the Mayo gang
Santa,
As I am a man shaped in your likeness – I’m also about the giving and not the taking – I want nothing for myself but I would like to see freedom of speech restored to our national broadcaster.
It has reached the pitiful stage now where you can’t have the craic questioning the competence or fairness of a referee without the snowflakes in RTÉ coming down on you like a blizzard from hell. It is only a matter of time before they deny Ciarán Whelan his constitutional right to be biased.
I am not a vengeful person, but since they have incurred my wrath the place has fallen apart.
Send them on some punditry cajones – I have some going spare – and let’s sort this out.
If you don’t, you are dead to me as a man. Yours Joe
Howya, Santa Boy,
How’s the craic? Thanks again for that stadium you sent us a few years back, but there is no end to its maintenance.
It is true what they say about the youth of today, they are utterly spoilt. No sooner had the stadium arrived with its two fine stands and
arrived with its two fine stands and a set of goalposts, and they wanted a field to play on as well. You couldn’t be up to them. We tried explaining that it was quite enough work to get our magic trees to grow money, without getting grass to grow on a field.
Anyhow we have it sorted now but they are still complaining that we have spent so much, outside of the generous grant we got from Lapland, of the house budget that we will be dining on beans and toast forever.
We have been trying to keep the family morale up but our audit and risk committee has just threatened to resign because we estimated our deficit for this year at €558,000, but they insist that the true figure is over €2.4m
I mean, when did a miscalculation like that ever get a sporting organisation into trouble? So we’re just wondering, would you have one of those committees who see no evil, hear no evil and, more importantly, speak no evil.
It is just that we were talking to John, a neighbour’s child, who said he got one of those from you years ago and he reckoned, on top of having great craic playing with it, he found it to be a very enriching experience.
Yours, The People’s Republic
Chief Commander of Christmas Gaiety,
It pains me to pen this missive to you but your presence is no longer required in our fair city.
Over the past seven years, from my own vantage point in the sky, I have furnished my people with bountiful gifts and after what I bequeathed them this summer, it will truly be Christmas every day.
And with all respect, your presence in our county would be a regressive one. Without getting personal, your body shape is not where it’s at anymore while your tendency to go all out on a mad winter rush, emptying everything you have on your craft in a single night, might serve well for the O’Byrne Cup... but we don’t do O’Byrne Cup here.
With your disdain for process you are as welcome as a drone flying over our airport, but I am sure they will leave the carrots out for you (that’s all they can afford) next door in Meath.
And if you do insist on stopping, then just drop a GI Jim action figure down Dessie’s chimney as he may be in need of some inspiration now that I am off for another challenge.
Apparently, productivity levels at the North Pole are not all they could be… Yours, Jim
Santa,
It is not that we didn’t appreciate your gift of a global hurling game, but it would appear the American diaspora, a community we always hold close to our wallet, have grown tired of the Super 11s.
Our market research has revealed that it is just not raw or primal enough for American taste buds, so we have been tossing a few ideas in the air as to how we can make it better.
We actually gave one of them a dry run this year when we got a couple of the lads to face off against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline.
We were going after the whole ‘Fight Club’ vibe but some at home took offence to the whole thing even though we tried to explain to these snowflakes that this is a game originally conceived in the killing of a wolf.
The Yanks love that yarn but a plan to include it as part of the Super 11s concept had to be dropped after an animal rights group got wind of it.
Anyhow, we are now going for a more moderate version of what we had in mind and have included a draft design, which we hope your elves can work off.
Please note the octagon cage as it is an integral part of the design feature which will house our bare-chested warriors and their sticks.