Sister 1 has been desperate for today to arrive since about….March.  Because as it is the first of December she is now ‘allowed’ to decorate for Christmas.  In her honour, I’m doing my first Christmas post.

So…

A couple of years ago I was talking about a friends Christmas party I’d been to aged 5.  Father Christmas had been there and I’d liked him very much, not because he’d given me a present, but because he’d let my best friend sit on his lap.  That made me very happy because, as you can see, my best friend was very poorly.

I was recalling this story with my mum and she laughed and said ‘We thought you’d guessed.  You came home and told dad that Father Christmas had a gold tooth just like his’.  Now, I may have been in my thirties at the time of this conversation but it still took some time for the underlying message to seep through…

That Father Christmas was my dad!  And it had taken me almost 30 years to work it out!

But no, it doesn’t stop there either.  I was telling the ‘finding out’ story to my sisters over a Sunday dinner and finished with a confident ‘but the Father Christmas that used to visit me at our aunts house…now, nobody knew who he was!’  It was important that there was a teeny bit of magic left in Christmas all those years back.  But Mum and Dad swapped looks…

Noooooooooooooooo.

So off I wandered to find the photo albums to see how stupid I really was back then.  And it turns out that yes, dad was the Father Christmas at my friends house, and yes, he had also been the Father Christmas at my aunts the year before. 

It was obvioulsy very yellow back in the 70's

BUT, the year before that it is not dad in the photo.  Nobody knew who it was.  So maybe, just maybe there was a bit of Christmas magic around back then :o)

Could this be the REAL Father Christmas?