8 sleeps to go... A letter to Father Christmas...

Have you written to Santa yet?

Every year she’d write a letter and we’d watch it fly up the chimney carried by the heat of the fire. One time it fell back down and I found it in the hearth the next morning, slightly singed but still intact. Lucky that it didn’t start a fire I guess. The writing of letters to Santa didn’t last long, a few years at most. By the time you learn to write it’s almost time to stop believing. Such a pity we can’t go on believing forever.

I remember writing my own letters to Santa. They weren’t very demanding; I wasn’t a very demanding kind of boy. Mainly it was a few toys – a train set, some Mecano, that sort of thing, things that any boy would want. Anything other than the boring socks my father’s mother bought me each year. These days I’m happy to get socks but back then… well, what could be more uninteresting to a six year old boy?

The first year that I could write, I wrote to Santa asking him to bring me a play garage. The one with the winding handle so that you could move toy cars from one floor to the next, the one with the ‘real’ petrol pumps outside and a forecourt. It even had a car showroom with opening doors so that you could get the cars in and out. It was made from wood and paper covered, which would scuff at the edges with use until it started to peel away. I could hardly wait to get my garage. It was just the place to keep my Corgi and Dinky cars.

As I disappointingly remember I didn’t get my garage that year. Instead Father Christmas delivered a dark-grey metal Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder. Very nice for some (my father), but not much fun for a barely five year old boy. You could hardly store you toy cars in a tape recorder and it didn’t even have a winding handle. After an hour of talking to myself, then playing it back I was bored. I wasn’t allowed to touch the buttons, so it wasn’t much fun at all. It was then that I thought of paint.

What fun I hade taping paper to the spinning spool mechanism then dropping paint onto it. It swirled everywhere, on and off the paper; it covered the recorder, me, our old green settee. What fun I had being an early Damien Hirst as I watched my action paintings take shape before my eyes. Of course when my father caught me he wasn’t best pleased and flew into one of his rages.

After a good slapping ‘my’ tape recorder was taken away; after all, I wasn’t ‘grown up’ enough to be trusted with it.

I almost didn’t write to Father Christmas the following year. But - worried that he would forget me - asked for my Shell garage again and this time I got it. There’s a moral in here somewhere but I’m not quite sure what it is. Perhaps it’s that being naughty always pays off in the long run or maybe it’s that some others, even your family, will always put their own needs and desires before your own and they are really not to be trusted.

By the time I was nine I’d given up writing to Father Christmas.