The Great Man seems to be getting better with age

Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s an uphill task trying to recreate the magic of Christmas ever since we grew too big for that great white bearded visitor from the North to call anymore.

Deep down in all of us, there is a bit of hankering to revisit that world where Christmas really was the most wonderful time of the year with relatives calling, laden with presents; geese and ducks being prepared for the great feast; and the highlight of it all, the arrival of Santa Claus in the deepest hour of Christmas Night.

There was always something of a doubt about his visit with a little review of the year undertaken by early December, where such misdemeanours as a football being kicked through a kitchen window; the axle of a bicycle being broken in a high speed collision on a back road; or the failure on occasional evenings to bring in the bag of turf from the reek at the gable end of the house. Could such things, individually or collectively, be enough to merit the punishment of Santa Claus deciding to pass by the house in a move that would equate to the death sentence.

The old codger was always good enough to overlook such wrongdoings but the trip down the stairs on early Christmas morning ‘to check him out’ was loaded with trepidation and anxiety. On many mornings, only the two top steps of the stairs would be traversed on my own, with either mother or a brother called to engage in a reconnaissance run to confirm the arrival of the Great Man.

Back in the 1960s, Santa Claus just didn’t have the same budgetary clout as today, even allowing for the financial collapse of recent years, but such items as animal van trucks, wind-up cars, the inevitable football and a variety of toy guns were always regular favourites.

To this day my two great regrets with Santa Claus was his failure to bring a train set or a toy rifle. At eight or nine, I was getting slightly fed up with my revolver collection, with no sign of a rifle arriving to shoot the Indians, that as true cowboys across the fields of Ballyglunin, we battled with most weeks through the years. It was a bad week that we didn’t lay low at least half a dozen Indians and there wasn’t even the remotest trinket of guilt over our intrinsically racist desire to rid our gardens from an enemy with paint on their faces and feathers protruding from their temples.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.