Night Santa faced an explosive Gunn

I may have told the most of ye this real Christmas yarn a couple of years ago but, dammit, a fair few of ye probably missed it then — and it is the absolutely true story of the lively and inventive farmer who lived in the next parish to us in my youth, and is well worth telling again.

This farmer, you see, feloniously assaulted and battered and ambushed poor old Santa Claus on at least five or six Yuletides when times were hard, his family of seven sons and daughters all young and rising, and when many of us Irish in that time and place did things differently to now.

I would not have told ye before that the surname of the farmer who ambushed poor Santa was Gunn, though in all fairness, he did not deploy his shotgun in any of the annual ambushes. That weapon, though, almost came to be used one Christmas by somebody else — but we will come to that shortly.