I was young when I discovered that Santa Claus didn’t exist. It’s pretty much one of my first memories. This, as far as I can remember, is how my world fell apart:
I was fighting with my least-favourite cousin in the street. He said: “Father Christmas isn’t real”. I said: “Yes he is,” and ran inside to tell my mum. She said: “No, he is real, Robert’s just being evil,” and I did my best to forget about the whole sorry affair.
But I could never quite shake what Robert had said, and when I eventually found definitive proof – Mum stuffing presents into stockings on the landing late at night one Christmas Eve – my reaction was more dull resignation than blinding outrage.
But part of me wants to track down my cousin and shake his hand. Because it’s only now I have children of my own that I realise what a colossal pile of hooey the whole Santa lie is. It’s starting to drive me a bit mad. Honestly: fuck that guy.
This will be my oldest kid’s third Christmas, which is to say it’ll be his first. He was an oblivious little fleshball during his first Christmas, then he primarily saw his second as an excuse to pull our tree over whenever the opportunity presented itself. It’s only now that he’s starting to develop a grasp of the main festive traditions. He’s got the advent calendar cracked, he knows all the words to ‘Jingle Bells’ and, when people ask him what he wants to receive this year, he’s got far enough along the thought process to reply with the word ‘presents’. He sort of understands Father Christmas too. I know this because we keep taking him to meet Father Christmas, and he keeps looking genuinely traumatised by what he sees.
Which, to be fair, I get. If someone I implicitly trusted tried to lead me into a shed in the middle of a shopping centre, and inside the shed there was an elderly man with an almost entirely obscured face, and the elderly man promised to give me a gift so long as I sat on his knee, I’d like to think that I’d throw a bit of a tantrum too. Putting any temporary parental embarrassment aside, I actually quite admire the kid’s inelasticity.
And if he isn’t going to bend to the mere presence of Father Christmas, then he absolutely isn’t going to buy any of that Naughty or Nice bullshit. Because that’s all Santa is, really; a behavioural control device. He’s a mystical figure who’s constantly assessing everyone’s actions in order to shame the slightest impropriety. He’s a cross between a CCTV camera and an especially hysterical Daily Mail headline. He’s a private landlord who’s already decided to pocket your security deposit. And yet, right from the word go, kids are actually taught to love this beardy Sauron motherfucker. Sure, he’ll creep into your house, eat all your mincepies and punish you for failing to grasp the complicated moral and ethical ramifications of impulses you’re far too young to properly understand yet, but he still gets to be a hero because he puts a satsuma in a sock once a year?
Well guess what? That isn’t even Santa’s satsuma. That’s my satsuma. My satsuma that I bought with my own money. I bled for that fucking satsuma. I worked nights to afford that satsuma. I missed dinnertimes and bedtimes to be able to put that fucking satsuma in your sock, you ungrateful little toad, and now we’ve all got to pretend that Father Christmas did it? Now I have to spend all of Christmas morning oohing and aahing about the supposed generosity of some beardy bullshit Mickey Mouse/Jesus hybrid instead of getting even a fraction of the praise I deserve? Fuck that.
I mean, for God’s sake, the clues are there. Look at your stocking you little idiot! Look how all the presents are wrapped up. It’s exactly the same paper as your main present. That’s my handwriting on all the gift tags too. What, you think that Santa also has the magical ability to mimic handwriting? Does he bollocks. Santa Claus can’t do diddly shit. I’m the big potato around here. Come on, genius, figure it out. I’m the one who paid for this entire bloody hoopla. Give me the recognition I deserve. Me. Your father.
And don’t get me started on the Easter Bunny.