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Last year, I thought I was so clever. By accident, I manipulated the magic of Christmas to make my life easier. Every time I heard myself explaining My Father Christmas Strategy to other parents I felt stronger and more powerful. Am I… better than everyone at this? Well, no, obviously not, because I can’t be arsed to set up those Elvish crime scenes around my house and while we’re on the topic; J. R. R. Tolkein was the best at Christmas because he wrote and illustrated those beautiful letters from the North Pole each year, and of course, he continues to father Christmas1 in ways he never could have known - but let’s not get into why The Lord of the Rings movies are Christmas films (until next month?) and let me tell you about my clever Santa hack that almost ruined Christmas.
‘Father Christmas only brings you one present.’ That’s it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. You know how Father Christmas goes around, spelunking up and down chimneys and leaving precisely one perfectly wrapped present under each tree. That’s the part I told my daughter was true; he only brings you one thing. Yes, Father Christmas will bring you a present. No, he doesn’t have the house under surveillance to monitor your behaviour. Yes, you must write him a letter, and make it a good one, he gets loads of these things, put some effort into it. And yes, you can tell him what you’d most like that single present to be. He’s a busy guy.
I like the idea of Father Christmas, he’s #iconique, and I find Christmas morning to be very magical for all sorts of reasons. These days it’s smoked salmon and champagne reasons, but when I was little there were lots of things I really looked forward to; Christmas Day Top of the Pops, the Christmas Day film on BBC One around tea time, the way there were extra animations on in the morning for children who got up too early. Ok, all these memories are TV-related but scheduled TV did used to be quite magical, and never more so than at Christmas.
Presents were good too, though. Less important for me, perhaps. My birthday is on Christmas Eve, so I’m coming in fresh off a day of presents and treats (yes, I still get a real birthday, no, I don’t get joint presents, yes, anyone who truly loves me does the decent thing and uses non-Christmas paper. Everyone else gets a birthday, it’s not my fault I get both on the same weekend.) So I’m happy to keep the magic of Father Christmas alive for as long as its relevant to my daughter. I suspect she already knows the big man doesn’t actually come into the house, but I do think she believes him to be real, and she understands that the men in the suits in the supermarket are not him.
I’m not going to ask her to explain how the present gets here, but the arrival of a gift from him is a contained sort of wonder that we’re happy to meet in the middle of magic and absolute nonsense. It being just one gift, I thought, was a good way to keep a lid on the potential madness that a child with access to a magical toyshop might create. I remember another parent telling me that somehow her daughter believed that ALL Christmas presents were from Father Christmas, at every house she visited and was given a present, from every aunt, friend and grandparent, was actually from FC. What a disappointment, I thought, to thoughtfully select and wrap a present that you feel is perfect for the small person in your life, and then have that old man Nicholas, who gifted the same item to millions of other kids all over the world, take all the glory. It’s too problematic to make Santa the be all and end all of presents. That power is too great for even one myth. What about the child, who believes Santa’s magic to be so powerful they can ask for a gift that the parent cannot afford, or the child who has a list of presents so long it was easier to just tear out the pages of the Smyths Catalogue. Why shouldn’t Santa fulfil these demands? What’s it to him? His currency is magic.
I decided that my daughter could ask for just one thing from Father Christmas that she would like, and write to see if he might be able to sort that out. If she got any other presents over Christmas (spoiler, she would) they’d be from the people who had handed them to her. You know, common sense, plus magic. This is perhaps inferred by most households who partake in the propping up of Santa Clause As An Actual Gift-Giving Presence, but I made a point of saying it a few times, out loud and in public. She can ask for one special thing from the magic man and she can thank us for the rest. Of course she’d get gifts from us, and if she wanted to share a few ideas for what, ideally, they’d be, that’d be fine, but there’d be no guarantee she’d get them. We aren’t magical. We’re just Mum and Dad. Santa would arrange the most precious present because… well, he’s a legend.
Last year, a few months before Christmas, she set her five-year-old heart on a Little Live Pets Mama Surprise Guinea Pig. It’s a plastic guinea pig toy in a plastic crate, that you can feed with plastic lettuce and brush with a plastic hair brush. But the fun doesn’t end there, because somehow, after you’ve been feeding and brushing and loving your new plastic pet, she’s going to produce some babies. Yes, it’s true. By the miracle of nature plastic, Mama is going to Surprise you with one-two-three little guinea pig babies, and they’ll just appear in the soft straw (plastic) bedding, exactly like in real life with no straining or blood or anything.
This was the toy she truly wanted and because I wanted to see how the hell it worked, I agreed. It wasn’t huge, and it wasn’t hundreds of pounds, and she likes to brush hair. Fine. Let’s write the letter. Let’s formalise this deal. The writing of the letter signifies a binding contract between you, The North Pole and Smyths Toys Superstore that you can’t change your mind on what present you’ve asked for, even if you get a different, better, idea on the 22nd of December. That’s the good thing about writing the letter in pen – no backsies.
I’d seen the Guinea Pig toy in the shops. They had tons of them. Because she’s invited to a birthday party every bloody weekend, we often have to go to the toy shop and she’d peek at the Mama guinea pigs in their prisons and say, ‘I’m going to get one for Christmas, aren’t I?’ And I’d say ‘I think Santa can definitely do that for you’. ‘'Why would he deny you this small plastic mammal and her three mysterious children?’ ‘There’s absolutely no reason why he won’t get you this toy.’
And then, because she was always with me, in the toy shop, I didn’t buy it. And because there were so many of them on the shelves, I didn’t worry about them not being. At some point, when Christmas was drawing close enough for me to actually feel festive enough to start shopping, I sent my husband on the mission to secure Mama on his way home from work. Mama would stay in the car until daughter was asleep, then we’d move Mama to her hiding place until it was time to wrap her, in separate Christmas paper and label her With love from Santa.
Surprise! Mama sold out. Surprise! Mama no available. Surprise! Mama all gone.
I’d really gift-wrapped myself here. I’d let her ask for ONE thing. ONE toy to make the story come true. ONE gift on which to rest the whole of Christmas magic on. What would it mean, if Mama wasn’t there? Was my daughter secretly a Naughty Child who didn’t deserve her heart’s desire? Was Father Christmas actually a bit wishy-washy on the details and just dumped a generic toy in each house; what was the point of writing to him – maybe those Supermarket Santas were closer to the real thing than she’d thought?! Why, when Mummy even agreed, that Mama Surprise could come and live with us, and she’d written such a lovely letter with a picture and everything, had she been denied her One Christmas Wish?
This is a story about stakes. You see, unwittingly, I’d raised them, and while I knew that ultimately my daughter was reasonable enough to forgive me, and Father Christmas, for the oversight, it seemed such a shame, and so silly, to squash the magic of these mad traditions so early in her life. She was only recently five, and it felt too soon to have to explain that sometimes things just didn’t work out.
I’ll put you out of your misery now, and tell you that some regular stock surveillance on stores all over the country, a notification at a store near enough to an out-of-town relative and a covert handover at a family dinner meant Mama Surprise was secured before the big day and appeared in all her glory on Christmas morning. We welcomed three guinea pig babies later that day (they fall from a hatch in the roof of the hutch over a duration of several hours, then you find them in the hay. It was a lot more exciting than I expected.) Mama and her babies still live with us and are in good health. They’re fed and brushed regularly, and sometimes the babies wear little hair clips and bobbles in their fur. We’re all very happy, and I feel a lot closer to Mama Surprise than I would have if I’d just bought her in September. I appreciate her now. I respect her.
I’m telling you all this because it’s November and I’ve started NaNoWriMo (do we bother with the capitalisation anymore or is that just showing off my status as a first-timer?). I’ve spent the first week writing part of a new story and I’m happy with my progress. I’ve written more than 6000 words, which is a lot for a writer who usually has to fit an entire story into 400. I’ve written to the end of a first part, which is for a particular character, and I wanted it to read like a self-contained short story, which would then fit into a wider project as part of a novel. I’m happy with what I’ve written but when I read it back, I know the stakes need to be raised to give this part its own drama. Where’s the slow ratchet of the story that cranks up the pressure? Where is the part when I make promises that can’t be kept and how do they can carry more than the weight of one person’s disappointment? How do I make the fate of magic itself rest on these small events?
I’m a drama-dodger by nature, I hate conflict, it’s embarrassing, it’s pointless. I struggle to take part in an argument because we all have be here again tomorrow and it’s going to be awkward if we had those loud feelings instead of just squashing them down like a civilised person and writing about them when no one was looking. That’s a joke, I struggle to write about them too. I find negative feelings very hard to conjure up because I don’t enjoy having them. But in fiction, I have to make it believable that people care about things enough to raise their voices. They have to be on the verge of doing things I’d never dream of, and to get to that verge, the stakes have to raised. So I’m considering what I wrote, which is good, but quiet, and wondering how I can raise these stakes. It doesn’t need to be life-or-death, but it needs to at least be Mama-Surprise-or-No-Mama-Surprise. It needs to matter as much as that plastic guinea pig mattered to this mother without one last December. Those are the sort of stakes I can relate to. Those are the sort of stakes I can write.
This is a longer post than I intended, and thanks if you’ve read this far. I’m going back to my nanowristory now, I know what I need to do…
In fiction: Raise The Stakes!
In real life: Buy The Bloody Toy Earlier!
co-parents with Peter Jackson
As a fellow Christmas baby, I am generally okay with never knowing what it’s like to have a regular birthday but I draw the line – thick, and in red ink – at being wished ‘happy birthday’ in a Christmas card or, worse, someone using up space in my birthday card to wish me happy Christmas (as grateful as I am for the card).
This was great. All my love to Mama Surprise and the Surprisettes.
"Yes, you must write him a letter, and make it a good one, he gets loads of these things, put some effort into it" I love that you're describing the Santa letter as a training ground for a young writer, plus some education in the art of pitching - make it stand out!
Thanks for the link to Tolkein's Christmas letters, I'd never heard of them before! I wonder if there's a Santa diary Substack out there 🤔 🎅 📔