Toby Clements says that there’s a good reason many children find Father Christmas an alarming figure — he’s an unresolved hotch-potch of different myths
Last year in the run-up to Christmas I took my two-year-old son to get his hair cut in one of those strange hybrid toy-cum-barber shops that proliferate in north London. It was going as well as one could hope until they announced a surprise guest as a special treat, Father Christmas. In he came, roaring his ho ho hos and waggling his curly white beard. It didn’t matter to my son that it was just a local fatty wearing a lot of cotton wool and a velour hoodie. All that mattered was that he was strange. The boy shot out of the chair, ripped off his tabard and ran behind my legs screaming, ‘Don’t let the Red Man get me!’
Christmas was spent in a fever.
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