The Night Before Christmas

Celebrating the Fake News

For adults, Christmas Eve in Britain (as distinct from the rest of Europe) is a busy day of last-minute shopping or travelling to stay with relatives. For children it used to be a day of almost unbearable suspense. My experience as a child is at least seventy years out of date, and it’s almost forty years since I celebrated Christmas as a mother. This poem is a memory of both.

I hope that there are still children who believe in the magic of even a secular Christmas, despite the tacky department store Santas and the confusing TV advertisements. Vanessa Lampert’s online workshop was a stimulus for this poem:

Fake News

(for Alice)

Those Christmas Eves when I lay
sleepless with anticipation, yet
no longer innocent of knowing
that Santa Claus was fake news.

But fake news was not a concept then.
Santa Claus was Father Christmas,
a legend that added extra magic
to the joy of receiving gifts.

Then those Christmas Eves when you lay
snoring gently in your darkened room
as we crept in to leave a bag of presents
knowing you’d be up at dawn

to show us the wonders magic wrought
each Christmas Eve. Innocent — you believed
the fairy tale despite rumours already rife
among your friends at school.

We loved that ritual, that white lie.
You were angry when a radio DJ
gave away the sad truth
of Santa’s non-existence.

Perhaps that betrayal was
the start of it —how could you believe
any of the facts the world broadcast
after that cruel exposure of the truth?

I was impressed a few days ago when Trevor Phillips, introducing one of his sarcastic TV interviews with one of our political leaders, attempted to refrain from spilling the beans about Santa Claus, by spelling out S-A-N-T-A when he expressed doubts about the old saint’s agency in our real world. He may have saved some children from a nasty shock — though I suppose it’s unlikely that they would have taken time out from watching CBeebies or Disney to pay attention to Sky News.