Dear Santa,
As one old fogey to another, greetings and good wishes and I hope the cold isn't getting to your arthritis.
Everything is ready at this end. The wrapping paper was bought in January and is last year's design, but they are too young to notice that. And the parcels are locked in the whiskey cupboard — they know that the only sin in this house is any attempt to investigate grandad's whiskey stock.
At any rate, you can count on my discretion and I am happy to act as your local representative for another year which is probably about as long as I can keep up the deceit.
I have to tell you that there are suspicions, muffled whisperings that probably originated, not from the seven-year-old and her friends but from one of the pagans at kindergarten. The parents are not enthusiastic about the subterfuge and when I remind their mother that she was ten before she gave up her profitable credulity, it is met with a watery laugh.
Nonetheless, this house is sound and although nationally the birth rate is down to 1.8, you are safe for a few more years yet.
But there are other heresies that threaten the continuation of your benign contribution to fellowship. The word commercialism is often used to describe them, but it is more serious than that: it is a reduction of the pageant of which you are one of the more prominent players, to a fable of no likelier veracity than Troy or Camelot.
Time was, as you know, when the world or that part of it we used to think of as Christian, was lit at this time of year by red window candles to guide a fleeing family, a time of carolling more than carousing, when we wished strangers happiness rather than merriment.
But they told us the lights were dangerous and they replaced them with blinking neon and they changed you from a benign giver into a rogue merchandiser.
In older times, you were as much part of what we celebrated as the crib and what it stood for. We invented you, Santa, and named you after a hirsute Russian bishop. For anyone who thought about it, you were a kind of parable; you helped