Is that Santa’s sleigh bells in the distance?

TRIGGER alert: if you’re under seven years old, look away now. Maybe make that 10. For I am about to reveal a secret that young children should never be a party to: Father Christmas doesn’t exist.

It’s your mum and dad putting presents into your stocking at night. If you’re an older child reading this, don’t tell.

Unfortunately not everyone got the memo. In a speech for which she has since said sorry, the mayor of West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, used a Christmas countdown event, of all places, to tell an audience full of very young children that the rustling under the Christmas tree is “just mum and dad”. Christine Jeffreys has issued an unreserved apology, but really, just how dumb do you have to be?

And why stop there? Why not disabuse them of notions about the Tooth Fairy, too?

It’s a long time since I enjoyed Christmas. Along with most of the people I know I start dreading it sometime around August. All that enforced good cheer.

But I dimly recall that when I was a child it was magical, all the lit-up trees and excitement over the presents.

We even remembered it was actually a religious celebration and sang Christmas carols round the piano, with my father playing the accompaniment. My mother baked two special sorts of biscuits along with homemade chicken liver pate, a tradition my sister has taken over and which still warms my very much hardened heart.

Above all, I remember spending one Christmas in Canada, with cousins roughly the same age as us. My cousin Genevieve and I were old enough to know the big secret about Father Christmas, namely that there wasn’t one, but my sister Caroline and cousin Bridget were a few years younger than us and still believed in Santa. “Don’t tell them,” urged our parents and not only did we go along with it, but at one point in the evening, Genevieve sat up. “Shh,” she said. “I think I’ve just heard the sleigh bells.” Caroline and Bridget were utterly rapt.

ERSTWHILE Bond girl (as we are no longer allowed to call them) Jane Seymour has said the time is right for a female 007. No it isn’t, and it never will be. Have they learned nothing at all from Doctorette Who?

Of course they found out the truth soon enough, as we all must do, not just about Christmas, but about life. But children grow up so fast these days, terrorised by the likes of the irritating brat Greta Thunberg, confused by issues such as transgender that not in our wildest dreams would we have thought of, and they deserve at the very least to hold on to the idea of a benevolent Father Christmas.

The season is upon us. Don’t shatter their dreams just yet.