Breaking the heart…

While it is true that I have conducted neither census nor survey, I am all the same fairly sure that this column is more popular with the grandparents than it is the grandkids.

I mean, no joke, I have had several people aged in their 60s come up and tell me that their mother or father loves ‘that wee article you do in the paper every week’.

On more than one occasion, I have got the impression that what they are really trying to tell me is that, while their 90-year-old mother is lightly amused by what I write, they themselves are still a bit too cool for my pensioner-pandering piffle.

So, seeing as my stuff seems to be too fusty for people born in the 1950s, I think it is safe to assume that this week’s Christmas column is not going to being passed around the playground when the weins return to school.

So, without the remotest risk of prematurely changing a child’s Christmas forever, let me tell you about the life-altering revelation that for me was the non-existence of Santa Claus.

There is a fella in the ‘Herald office who says that he – more or less – never believed in Santa.

He puts his life-long incredulity down to being a particularly skeptical child with an innate instinct for logical reasoning.

Anyway, unlike him, and like most unremarkable children, I was gullible as anything.

In fact, so thoroughly blinded by the wool that my parents pulled over my eyes, I would have laughed at children who attempted to tell me about the fictitious nature of Father Christmas.

“Aye, Santa isn’t real, and your sister isn’t the best-looking girl in P6. Wise up and catch yourself on Brendan!”

So unshakable was my belief in the big lad’s existence that I would discount evidence to the contrary with all the automaticity of a brainwashed religious fanatic.

One example of my readiness to delude myself came when, about P5, I stumbled upon one of my presents whilst hoking around my aul pair’s bedroom.

“Huh, that’s weird,” I said in forced naivety when I made my discovery, part of my brain trying to resist the chain of logic which had just been set in motion, the rest scrambling to construct a narrative that would account for the presence of the age-9 Liverpool jersey in my parent’s ottoman.

“Ah, yes, of course, they must have bought that for my cousin Matthew,” I told myself, despite the fact that the nine previous Christmases had seen Matthew get a card with £20 in it.

“Yeap, it’s for Matthew, and there is nobody that can tell me otherwise!”

I may as well have started chanting the mantra, “Santa’s real, Santa’s real, Santa’s real…”

Anyway, it must have been about a year after that I was given the earth-shattering, spell-breaking, paradigm-shifting truth.

It was a nice summer’s day when my ma came into the living room looking like she was about to tell me that a plane carrying everyone I knew and loved had just crashed into the side of a mountain.

“What?” I asked, already freaked out by the loaded look on her face.

She proceeded to break the news in the most tender manner she could manage.

“I am sorry, Emmet. I thought you might already have known.”

A bolt of rage came down through the top of my head and a mushroom cloud of misery erupted from somewhere beneath my bowels. I was fuming. It was as if she came in and told me she had went to the North Pole, beaten Santa over the head with a shovel and cast his lifeless carcass out into the icy water.

“How could you?” I sobbed, like a Shakespearian widow.

For about the next four days, while all my friends played football out the front, my ma may as well have followed me about the house with a mop, telling me that Christmas, still six months away, was not going to be destroyed.

On the one hand, I look back at myself and laugh with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. I don’t think I have ever told this story to another person who said they took the news as badly as I did.

However, on the other hand, it was the moment that the only evidence I had of magic, otherworldliness and the impossible being possible disappeared.

I do not know if I ever really had any deep religious faith, but I am pretty sure that the arrival of Santa every year was part of whatever structure kept open the possibility of there being a god; Jesus might never have called to the house, but every year he sent one of his best men to drop off the presents.

Maybe this is just me trying to make excuses for my ten-year-old self reacting like such a wimp.

However, I reckon hearing the truth about Santa really might have been the beginning of a greater unraveling.

l This article has been
identified as being part of a widespread disinformation campaign being waged by a group calling themselves ‘The Enemies of Christmas’. This means its author cannot be trusted, its contents should be regarded with the utmost
suspicion, and all accusations and insinuations relating to the
existence of Mr Santa Claus should be discounted and the opposite inferred. Yours
merrily, chairman of the Christmas Council.