Stockings and Christmas Gifts, Kids’ Trip to Santa’s Grotto

Posted by dodo

My heart leaps up when I behold a reindeer in the sky.

Now the children have broken up, it’s time for a trip to Santa’s Grotto. In Stroud this year, it only cost Sop for a visit and a present, and you could have your photo taken with Santa as well.

Playing Father Christmas these days is a pretty taxing job. In department stores, Santas must never ask a child how Mummy and Daddy are, because so many parents are divorced, and long explanations hold up the queue. Instead he must ask, ‘How are the folks?’ Nor must he say ‘Yo Ho Ho’

As it frightens the children; or mention chimneys because most kiddies haven’t got one; nor wear spectacles; and if asked where Rudolph is, he has to say ‘miles away’, or the kiddies will mob the car park looking for him.

The Santa School near Swindon insists on clean fingernails and no smoking or drinking because it makes the breath smell. Santas must also be hale enough to lift 200 children a day, and sharp enough to field requests like, ‘Can I have a race horse?’ or ‘Will you bring me a twin baby sister?’

Santa’s life, in fact, is not a happy one. He often gets peed on, children make a point of stamping on his feet as they clamber on to his knee and, as one Father Christmas replied when asked why he was wearing shin pads: ‘If the little sods didn’t get something they asked for last year, they come back this year and kick the hell out of me.’

Stephen Pile had the wonderful fantasy that all Santas were members of the NUJ writing their Christmas pieces.

Occasionally Santa hits back. Last Christmas I saw one turning the air as blue as the flame round the Christmas pudding, because he couldn’t get a taxi in Piccadilly. Others, according to the Sunday Telegraph, have boxed the ears of recalcitrant children, fought among themselves over a street corner pitch, and been hauled up because they spent more time peering into the ladies changing-rooms than dispensing Christmas cheer.

In Russia, where there is a five-rouble visiting Santa Service, he is called Father Frost. Usually he gets plastered on vodka tots on the way, and seldom makes later appointments. In Islington, most Santas are women who don’t need false beards.

Hardly surprisingly — not all children like the idea of the Red at the end of their bed. One little girl asked her mother to hang her stocking outside the door, as she didn’t want strange men in her room.

My niece, Clemency, was totally convinced from the age of four that Father Christmas was a member of the IRA and was absolutely terrified of him. According to my sister-in-law, ‘She not only wouldn’t hang her stocking in her room, but also barricaded both ends of the corridor. We used to dread Christmas in case she caught sight of Father Christmas in a always to be 2.00 a.m. on Christmas morning. I would battle to the end of the Christmas Eve rat race, which invariably involved buying all the stocking presents, getting tight at my husband’s office party, tearing back to Putney — usually to find that some ancient relations had arrived early and been parked outside the house for hours — getting them and the children through dinner and to bed, going to midnight mass, and returning usually still tight to tackle the tights. Desperately wrapping presents in torn-up newspapers, I could never remember which pair of tights was destined for which child, so gave dolls to my son, and cap pistols to my daughter (of which no doubt the feminists would have approved) then, realising that I’d put two boxes of Rose’s chocolates into one stocking, would unpack the whole thing and start again.

It’s hardly surprising, after such cavalier treatment, that my dear children never wanted to open their stockings very early. But just as my husband was terribly sweet the year I wrapped all the stocking presents in pages of his Times Literary Supplement, which he hadn’t yet read, my children never seemed to mind that the tights they unpacked were never the same colour as the ones they’d hung up, nor that Father Christmas left all the prices on, or that he shopped at the Tiny Set (our local toyshop) ‘like you do, Mummy’.

It’s hard to remember what presents were successful. But I know that they liked body make-up, noisy musical instruments, plastic fried eggs, expanding worms in tooth mugs, garden gnomes in snow storms, paper fans, chocolate cigarettes, Lindt chocolate kittens, glow stars and joke presents, so that they could disappear and rush back giggling with huge orange ears, protruding false teeth, and bloody bandaged fingers.

One of the greatest problems is balancing the stockings so that each child gets a fair share. Even that doesn’t always work. My sister-in-law said that her two older children always charged at everything, ripping the parcels open and finishing in a few minutes, while the youngest child slowly and patiently undid every parcel, viewed what was in it, played with it, and then put it neatly in his box. The other two, convinced that he’d got four times more than they had, sulked or punched him as the mood took them. She can still remember her rage as a child when my husband got a toy spitfire and she only a Wellington bomber — and the great relish with which she kicked him.

Stockings get easier as children get older. By the time our children were twelve and fifteen, we had to wake them up at ten o’clock on Christmas morning, because we couldn’t bear to wait any longer to see how they’d react to their stockings. This year a serious imbalance in both quality and quantity of the stockings went quite unnoticed because my son unpacked his at midday, and my daughter hers at a quarter to one.

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