THERE was a terrific row in the press some years ago when a primary school teacher unwisely informed her class of nine-year-olds that Santa Claus was not real.
Incensed parents accused her of ruining Christmas for their children. What rang false as a wooden bell was the supposed degree of 'emotional damage' suffered by these cruelly disillusioned nine-year-olds.
Have you seen the way nine-year-olds dress and behave, or listened to their boyband-worshipping, technology-obsessed, streetwise chat?
They bade goodbye to belief in Santa long ago, but cunningly proclaim continuing faith because the mercenary little beggars know it pays.
Their parents collude in the fiction despite the Santa story's growing irrelevance in an age of 365-day instant gratification.
Maybe it's time to come clean? In a climate where everything can be explained with cold logic and suspicion and distrust are endemic, how do we account for the incongruous presence of an obese old man, cheeks suffused with drink-induced thread-veins, breaking into bedrooms at night to distribute presents to children he's not related to?
I marvel now at my generation's naivety. We swallowed the myth in its entirety till we were in double figures.
Remember the thrill of anticipation as the letter to Santa was despatched up the chimney in a flurry of charred paper fragments? It was a brief wishlist, for Santa couldn't abide greed.
Some thread of intuition told us too, that Santa's beneficence was vaguely bound up with family finances.
We woke on Christmas morning to a modest bounty - a toy or two, a game, an annual, a selection box - and were grateful.
Today's children are an avaricious bunch. Dazzled by advertising, brainwashed with stuff that engages their interest for a brief hour, then lies forgotten.
December phone-in programmes are pestered with requests from demented parents for help in locating stockists of this year's must-have toy or gadget.
They'll go anywhere, pay anything to acquire it, or, they say, "their wee one will be heartbroken".
They'll get over it. It's mum and dad who will be riddled with guilt at disappointing them.
Whence came this insidious notion that unless you bankrupt yourselves for your children, you're an inadequate parent?
Among children, contagion spreads like wildfire, contagious as nits. Daughter Dear came home from school wanting everything her classmates were getting for Christmas. I decided to deal with the problem at source.
"Climb upon my knee Daughter Dear," I said, "and let's have a little discussion on economics.
"You're an intelligent five-year-old. Let me explain.
"Money is a finite resource. We can't afford to buy you everything you want."
She cast me a sceptical glance. "Where do you think the money comes from?" I asked.
"The bank of course," came her ready and scornful response.
"What if we've no money left in the bank?" I enquired reasonably.
"You've a card mummy. You can get money out of the hole in the wall."
It was the same year that a visit to a seedily unconvincing store Santa triggered the killer question every parent dreads - "Which is the real Santa?"
"Sarah dear," I explained, "St Nicholas was a King of Bohemia in fifteen-hundred-and-something who thought all children should have presents on the anniversary of the birth of Baby Jesus.
"He was a well-meaning man in his way, but little did he know what he was letting Christendom in for."
She nodded sagely. Thus far she was with me. "All these other Santas, Sarah dear, are merely the visible embodiment of the capitalist profit motive and, as such, ought to be given neither credibility nor custom."
"I see," she said.
"The real Santa," I continued, "lives at the North Pole and is particularly fond of sweet sherry and Rich Tea biscuits.
"On Christmas Eve he will manage to negotiate our unswept chimney with a nimbleness belying his considerable bulk, in order to deliver your presents."
She mulled this over for a while, then asked: "Mummy - is Santa God?"
"The way some people carry on Sarah dear, one would think he is..."
