What, no Santa?
Learning that Santa isn’t quite L what your parents told you is when Christmas loses its thrill – until we recapture the magic through our children, as Angela McMahon did when the roles were amusingly reversed:
“My husband and I had been married for 20 years and, heartbreakingly, had no children until we decided to foster two brothers and their sister, all aged under ten.
“When Christmas 1988 came around I had been a mum for six months and I think I was more excited than them. I woke at 5am on Christmas morning, but there wasn’t a sound. I couldn’t go back to sleep. 6am came, then 7am, and still no noise from their bedrooms. By 7.30am I could wait no longer and rushed in, calling ‘Santa’s been!’.
“Three sleepy-eyed children came into our room, clutching bulging stockings. Then the excitement began and the joy and wonder of a Christmas with my own children made it the best one ever.”
Angela Patchett was only four when she learned the awful truth: “At midnight I was awakened by a noise on the stairs. Mum was shouting: ‘Don’t you dare drop those dolls, Jack, one of them has a china head!’
I crept to the top of the stairs and startled my dad who dropped everything. What a disappointment it was to find that Dad was actually Santa and my presents were all dolls when I longed for books.”
But Angela was a tactful little girl who knew that her mother had never possessed a doll when she was a child so had compensated by buying eight to give her daughter:
“In the morning
I enthusiastically ‘discovered’ my presents
‘Don’t you dare drop those dolls, Jack, one of them has a china head!’
and when Mum asked me about the dolls I said, ‘I am going to play school with them today’ because I felt sad that she had never had any of her own.”
Wendy Preece’s brother was not so tactful: “When I was four, my brother (who was eight) saw our mother coming up the stairs with our presents.
“She was dressed in a full Father Christmas outfit but I have never forgotten him saying matter-of-factly, ‘It’s Mum. I can tell by her shoes’.”
When Janice Reynolds met her grandson Nat from school, he came out with a long face and told her ‘Nan, someone told me something very sad today’: “I asked, ‘What was that, darling?’ and he replied, ‘They said there was no Father Christmas’.
“I gasped in horror and Nat said, ‘Oh Nan, I knew you would be upset!’.”
The Christmas Heather McEwen remembers fondly was when her father went out to brush away the snow and returned with a beautiful doll’s pram: “He said he had just seen Father Christmas along the lane. Inside the pram was a doll dressed in clothes knitted by my gran.
“With a winter wonderland outside and a big coal fire inside, what child could wish for more? Happy days.”
You are right, Heather, climate change and central heating have sadly made those story-book Christmases a thing of the past.