I have never written a letter to Santa.
Not really sure why, it just wasn't something that we did as kids. There was no such thing as KKs in school - unless it was someone's nickname - there were no school plays, and certainly no letters to Santa.
Even if there were, the letters would have been vetted by our parents before they were sent.
I can see my parents and my friends parents looking at the letters to Santa and saying things like, "Ah, sure there's no way Santa has enough money to get you that. Nobody has any money these days," or "Would you look at this. He wants a dog. What are we going to feed the thing? We barely have enough bread and sugar to last the week never mind feedin' a dog. Change dog to worm. That way we can just put it out in the garden and it can feed itself."
The point was we could ask for whatever we wanted, but in the end we got what was under the tree with our name on it. If we didn't like it we were told there were plenty of other children in the world that didn't have anything and that we could gladly give it to them.
Yeah, I know, wah, wah wah. Stop whining and all that.
But I'm not whining. Christmas was great when I was a kid. The thing is it was always a surprise to see what was under the tree. That is if we could get the door to the living room unlocked first.
Even the year when my brother and I got a red bike with pedal back brakes that we had to share 'cos we certainly weren't going to get a bike each, we loved it. Doing skids all over the street and trying to pull wheelies, all without a helmet and elbow and knee pads. It was brilliant.
Every room in our house had a key to lock it so if someone broke in they would only have access to the one room.
The thing my parents didn't know at the time, and something which we found out through trial and error, was that the key to the bathroom fit the living room and we could open the door unbeknownst to my parents, nab the presents and run into the kitchen to rip them open.
I remember myself and my older brother Martin sneaking into my parent's bedroom a week or so before Christmas while they were out, and searching in the closet and the storage space above the closet, which required using a stool and shoulders to stand on. In there we found a bunch of toys. Nothing we had asked for, but that didn't matter. They were cool toys, and we were squawking with delight knowing that we were going to have a good Christmas and trying not to give the game away for the next week until it was officially Christmas.
However, on Christmas day what we had seen in the storage space was not what we saw under the tree. It turned out my parents figured we would be on a Navy Seal mission to find the presents, so they swapped ours with the neighbours. When the neighbour's kids went on their secret present-finding mission they found our presents.
Not cool.
I remember me and my brother getting bows and wooden arrows one year with the suction cups on the end of the arrows. After we got bored sticking them to people's heads my parents kicked us out. So we took the suction cups off, got a pencil sharpener and made the arrow tips a little less blunt so we could have some proper fun.
When the first transistor radios came out with a tape deck attached, it was something I had to have. As a young teenager I was told that it was too expensive and I would have to pay half if that was what I really wanted. So I did.
I went to bed with my ear on the speaker listening to it for hours, with the volume as low as I could so my parents couldn't hear it. Funny thing is, an hour after going to bed I remember my mom calling up the stairs for me to turn the radio off. I couldn't figure out how she could hear it down in the kitchen when I could hardly hear it with my ear on it.
That convinced me that mothers really did have bionic hearing. It was only a long time later I figured I must have fallen asleep on it and she came in to check on us.
I have a lot of fond memories of Christmas in my youth even if we didn't get to write to Santa or always get what I wanted under the tree.
So when my son gets upset because Santa hasn't written back to him yet I have to regail (bore) him with tales of Christmas when I was young in the hopes of making him feel better. I could just tell him to suck it up that Santa had to lay some of the elves off this year as the economy is not recovering as fast as he thought in the North Pole, or simply that Santa didn't pay attention in school and so he doesn't know how to count or write and that's why he didn't write back to him and also explains why mom got 12 pairs of boots last Christmas instead of two. I could soften the blow by telling him Santa has so many kids to write to, his hand got tired and he had to outsource the work to India so I'm not sure if he will be getting a letter this year, but he might get a phone call some night around supper time.
So I just told him to suck it up.
