ROTARY SANTA

The Santas are out. We saw one yesterday, perched in a Rotary Club sleigh outside Sainsburys. To be honest, he looked a little ropey, as though strung together at the last minute - off-red coat, cotton-wool beard and a face far too young to be the real thing. Also, I’m not sure what Rotary Santa was supposed to be doing, as all he had with him was a charity bucket and a stereo blasting out “Santa Claus is Coming To Town” at a distorting volume.

What do kids make of these Pound-Shop Santas? They surely can’t be fooled, can they? I mean, are there parents wheeling trollies into Sainsburys who are pushing the idea that the lonely man in a painted crate is the real, actual, bona-fide Father Christmas? I can barely believe it.

“Oh they’re just pretending to be the real thing,” I can just about remember my Mum whispering to me in a 1980s BHS. We’d been queuing up to see a man in a cupboard, guarded by surly elves and plastic penguins. She was trying to convince me that the people in Santa’s Grotto - including the elves with the look of disdain - were sort of representatives of an invisible, but very real Father Christmas, who obviously was too busy preparing at the North Pole at the time, and certainly wasn’t frequenting department stores in the Home Counties. No, she was clear - these people were his helpers, and I was to go along with the game of pretending while perched on the knee of a stranger, so as not to hurt their feelings or give the game away.

I’m not a parent. I don’t know how you navigate this topic with small children. I don’t even know if you can apply the same approach twice, or even if you should try. All I know, and all I knew then was, if there was a real Father Christmas, a real person who squeezed down our chimney and popped through the electric-bar heater somehow, it didn’t matter even half as much to me as being loved by Mum and Dad. So going along with the pretence was easy. Then I got a little sister and actually being one of Santa’s Little Helpers for her sake became my nudge-nudge wink-wink role. In fact, even now she texts me on Christmas morning to say: “He’s been! He’s been!” She’s 37.

Anyway, I smiled at Rotary Santa yesterday. I couldn’t tell whether he smiled back as his beard just wasn’t able to move the way normal beards do - along with his mouth. He jangled his bucket and looked at me with tired eyes. Why does Saint Nicholas need to collect money for a charity? And why does it have to be me?

“He sees you when you’re sleeping, He knows when you’re awake…” blared the stereo perched on the arm of the immovable sleigh. Poor old Rotary Santa, I thought. The Real Father Christmas wouldn’t really approve of this kind of representation, I’d wager.

And the kids aren’t hoodwinked for a second either, are they?