Terry Prone: Santa’s old-fashioned parenting tricks for the naughty and the nice
Look. Santa’s been around for a while. A spring chicken he isn’t. Plus — as us collaborators know only too well — he has bad habits. It’s not the drugs or the drink. It’s the snacks.
You know the way we use the word ‘treats’ to excuse scoffing salted caramel anything? Covers a multitude, that word ‘treats’, with its implication of rarity and its paired implication of somehow having been earned by earlier privation or meritorious effort.
The world may not owe you a living, or fame, or fortune, but we still feel entitled to treats and extrapolate from that to the conviction that we must all reward/bribe Santa by setting out a saucer of cookies and a glass of milk. It’s a reprehensible form of cause and effect.
Parents spend the year conscientiously refusing ever to link food with their children’s occasional good behaviour. Back in the day, this wasn’t a problem because, once you had the bonding thing nailed, parenting was down to training your kids like dogs: “Homework done? Who’s a good boy, then?”
Then enlightenment struck and the instructions to well-behaved offspring to sit and gratefully snaffle a KitKat morphed into as shameful exemplar of your parental inadequacies so vile that you knew, if you stood for election, even a crime gang leader would do better than you.
Santa, of course, bypasses all this child development woke stuff. He still operates the canine training model: “Been a good girl? Here’s a whole stocking full of reward for you (insert ear-scratch here)!”
Understandably, the dog-training model works both ways. You use it to ensure reasonable pre-teen behaviour in your offspring, then accept that the quid pro quo is that the overweight guy in the red suit gets a few cookies left out for him.
We don’t even do the political reproach where Santa is concerned.
No parent ever complains: “We never see you except when you want free cookies, and I bet you haven’t declared the carrots for Rudolf to Sipo either.”
It’s arguable that the success, over these many generations, of the Santa Claus model of social conditioning is behind the benign Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell approach to Saint Nick himself regnant in the western world.
Presenters on radio programmes get more warnings from their producers about not breaching the unspoken rules than if the next guest was the Israeli ambassador.
Signs on it, when some bunch of medics this year raised reservations about Santa as a health model, the story died on the vine. Leave the old charmer alone, was the unspoken message, a bit like the consensus around Michael D.
Nor will the dire example of the Anglican priest Paul Chamberlain be readily forgotten.
This eminent cleric shared his truth with a congregation of 10-year-olds. Let’s not even delineate the shape of his ecclesiastical truth. All anybody needs to know is that it broke the Yuletide Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell rule, and peace on earth plus goodwill to all ceased, right there.
His public defrocking, defenestration, and forced pyre-toasting was averted only by him seeing the light and outing himself as a complete eejit.
In the litany of public sinning covered by the grandees of many religions, what he’d done might be regarded as down the scale a bit, but it represented a profound failure to read the room. The reverend priest would’ve been a lot better off finding a saucer, a couple of cookies, and a space beside the hearth for their display.
Santa may be all ho ho ho and product placement but, when it comes right down to it, you know you shouldn’t cross him.
It’s a bit like Pat Kenny quoting Gay Byrne to the effect that “one for everybody in the audience” was a dreadfully counterproductive move, the negative consequences of which meant that, on any given show, you might have a stunning lineup of guests and topics, but if the Late Late Show audience freebie that particular week wasn’t up to much, it tainted the in-studio appreciation and subsequent recollection of the entire show, turning the presenter into a freebie-shill and the audience into discount Olivers, always asking for more.
Perhaps — because those of us who love the programme — perhaps in the distant future, someone as wise as Gay will condemn the Toy Show and its relentlessly greedy brand extension to a full-day festival rather than the 90-minute celebration of the commercially mawkish and precocious that it really is.
Of course, the very minute you say anything against the Toy Show, you’re in trouble.
I blame my misfortune, this year, on that. Definitely. If I’d never bad-mouthed the Toy Show, I’d be fine.
Off I flew to spend Christmas in warm climes, and — before exiting the plane in Newark airport — dutifully checked I had phone and wallet. Two hours into a four-hour layover, I realised I’d left my iPad on the flight. “Oh-oh,” I went, in a Santa Claus reversal.
Inevitably, the plane had been turned around and was off to Cancún.
The customer service guy on the phone said he’d email me a lost property form, which I filled in and filed, before wandering the airport to locate a customer service human in the flesh.
This, after an hour and a half, I duly did. Lifted me out of it, she did. Stood there and ate the face off me. I was supposed to check my seat and surroundings for property before I left the plane, she snapped.
She effectively refused to help locate my battered little computer with its Sink the Rich sticker because I didn’t obey all the instructions.
‘Customer service’, said her United Airlines label but not her mouth. (The Sink the Rich sticker came for free when I ordered Bernie Sanders’ most recent book.)
I got on the second flight facing a future wherein all my colleagues, friends, and relations cast me aside as an incompetent inattentive old fool for losing an iPad that was too good for me in the first place.
My inner discourse tends towards the punitive and ageist at the best of times but after my bracing encounter with the customer service woman, it hit rock bottom.
I decided to lie or at least not tell on myself. Me? Lose an iPad? Perish the thought.
Then my phone started to buzz with messages from colleagues who could see United Airlines’ acknowledgment of my lost property form and they all began doing technological things to find out where it was (Newark Airport, surprise, surprise) and assure me that iCloud would have everything I’d ever put into the iPad stashed safely somewhere.
Aoife in the office found the iPad before the lost one and started to reprogramme it as a fallback. This greatly helped the grieving process.
Santa, meanwhile, continued the ho ho ho in his promiscuously cheerful way from every hoarding and radio programme.