Tommy Martin: Santa still remains bigger than Messi and Ronaldo put together

Unlike the sporting legends, who could afford the occasional off-day, Santa always delivered

Thu, 24 Dec, 2020 - 06:30

My peak Santa years were between the ages of seven and 11, after teddy bears and before the Braun electric shaver.

It’s no coincidence that this is also when a child might fall in love with sport. Like Diego Maradona, Seve and Steffi Graf, the Big Man remains a hero. If you get them at that age, you have them for life.

Unlike the sporting legends, who could afford the occasional off-day, Santa always delivered. One Christmas morning in the late 1980s, my brother and I crept into the living room at an ungodly hour. Our eyes searched through the thin moonlight, past the mince pie crusts and the well-drained brandy snifter, resting on a hoard worthy of Tutankhamun.

Scalextric, Subbuteo, a chess set, and the board game based on the quiz show Blockbusters. We have never been richer.

How does he do it, we wondered, while setting up Subbuteo’s perennial Merseyside derby? We were mad about sports and popular TV quiz formats. Now we had miniaturised versions of them — the whole world in our hands.

Our parents watched on with benevolent tolerance as we savoured our bounty. “Well, what did you get? Oh that’s great ... Where are you going to put that?’ But there was no time for pleasantries. It was Christmas morning, when we were kings.

We laid out the Scalextric track on the floor of the spare bedroom, an act of conquest unthinkable at any other time of year. I’m sure my mother had other plans for that room which did not involve it becoming a miniature Nürburgring. But what could she do? The man in red was making the rules now.

Hours of clicking together track and connecting electrodes later, we were ready for the full Scalextric experience: five seconds of racing before the inevitable horror smash. Incredible scenes here in the spare room.

The chess set was more acceptable. This was the time of Garry Kasparov, the world champion who was seen as representing the new Russia of perestroika and glasnost, mainly because he didn’t wear a tie. Crucially though, chess involves two people sitting quietly for quite long spells of time, which, for parents, is infinitely preferable to the sound of miniature Formula One cars crashing violently into freshly painted walls.

And Blockbusters too! The ITV show had made an unlikely star of host Bob Holness — an avuncular, school-masterly figure. Contestants were teenagers with mullets and cuddly toy mascots who did a funny hand-jiving dance over the title music. You had to choose a letter of the alphabet on the board to answer a question. My father found the line “Can I have a ‘P’ please Bob?” endlessly amusing.

And now here he was, his Holness himself, or at least a Holness-endorsed spin-off product, sitting in a living room in Donegal on Christmas morning. Truly, this was the magic of Christmas.

People think childhood is all fun and games. It isn’t. Most of your life is being told to do things you don’t want to do, eat things you don’t want to eat, and learning things you don’t want to learn. At Christmas, none of that applies. Months of longing and anticipation, and then, for one blissful morning, you are masters of the universe (another popular toy in the 1980s, coincidentally).

I discussed the situation weeks later with my friend Odhrán. Around that time there were malicious rumours going around that Santa wasn’t real. I argued that there was simply no way our parents would authorise such a lavish trove; it would be entirely out of character. No, we agreed, this could only be Santa’s work.

What separates Santa from the likes of Amazon is the personal touch. The letters should help but, in practice, they are next to useless: most are written in a barely legible scrawl or mention a non-specific ‘surprise’. It’s really no way to run an ordering system.

I like to think the key to Santa’s success is good old-fashioned intelligence-gathering. A worldwide network of elves acts as a spy ring that would put the KGB to shame. These pointy-eared spooks observe and record, then feed precious info back to the North Pole. This part of the operation is run by Mrs Claus, who is much like Judi Dench in the Bond movies.

As I wait to see what Santa has in store for my own children, like many parents, I worry. Their worlds seem to have shrunk inwards; the pull of the screen seems irresistible.

Even in our time, the delights of flick-to-click paled next to primitive 8-bit graphics. My nine-year-old loves sport too, but Subbuteo doesn’t cut it when there’s Fifa, whose goalkeepers don’t live on the end of plastic sticks.

Maybe our parents also worried about how the ways children played were changing. What was wrong with conkers and hopscotch? Why must they be constantly glued to that damn Speak & Spell? And would Santa would give them too much, or too little? Would it be the thing they wanted?

But Santa always gets it right. I ask my boy what Christmas mornings feel like to him. Excitement mixed with nervousness, he says. The naughty list is real, it seems. But then happiness, because of “getting the free toys and stuff”.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. And there’s still Lego. They like TV quiz show board games too. Catchphrase — “just say what you see” — is an unlikely survivor from the glorious 80s.

I think of my own parents and the Scalextric in the spare room and prepare to do my bit.

I may even figure out what a Fortnite Battle Pass is.

Someday they’ll do the same with their own and they’ll remember mornings like tomorrow when Santa was bigger than Messi and Ronaldo and the rest of them put together.

Some things do change, though. It’ll be a glass of milk, not Hennessy awaiting the great man tonight. I am tempted to stay up to toast his health, but then I remember the old saying: never meet your heroes.