Spinning a yarn

 

My late grandmother’s father was Irish. And to be honest I definitely have a touch of the blarney - whatever that means. In my mind I think it means I’m fiery, stubborn, creative and perhaps prone to over-exaggerating. It also means, as Athol Fugard says fairly frequently of his own Irish father, that I love to spin a yarn. 

As a child I could tell the most terrifying ghost stories - ask Edu Boettiger. They were properly bad. Because I had made them up they didn’t really affect me but the rest of the populace of children in Winterton born between the years of 1983 and 1990 may beg to differ. I also thought I was bringing magic into my baby sister’s world by telling her intricate stories about how her Barbies came to life every night. The details were a little bit too real for her and ended in some terrible nightmares for her. Basically I did Elf On The Shelf thirty years ago and the results weren’t great.

In my time I’ve got people to believe in fairies and Hogwarts, The Easter Bunny and that Woofles from Pumpkin Patch was real. I can be pretty persuasive.

In terms of returning to the fantasy of childhood today is one of my best days of the year. All the teachers with small children gather and wait for the old faithful school tractor and trailer to rattle along, we all scramble on - some with screaming children - and we go on the hunt for Father Christmas on campus. The older kids generally talk up a big game on the way because they’ve obviously know the bearded man for longer. After a fairly long and bumpy ride we normally find Father Christmas at the school gate. Father Christmas is often a slim and trim school intern in his early 20s who didn’t think that his duties would include standing awkwardly on the back of a tractor while 30 terrified children stare back at him. Had the tractor not been so noisy you would have been able to hear a pin drop. I tried to get a bit of Jingle Bells going but Gray shot me his ‘I know what you did last summer’ look and I promptly shut up. After a lengthy journey back in stony, terrified silence Father Christmas and the sweaty crew disembarked and headed to the headmaster’s house for presents, party packs and tea. Like I said, as someone all about make believe and fantasy, it is my favourite day. But our long tractor ride to all the outer extremities of campus also got me pondering. 

Now this ponder comes from the perspective of a Christian mom. And here it is - how do we justify giving power to a figure who isn’t really real but that we can see as opposed to communicating with our children the very real power of someone who is real but that we can’t see?

This morning I fell into a trap I swore I’d never fall into. I told one of my children to be good so that they could get a present from Father Christmas. And fair enough - the day was all about the old codger- but I don’t ever want to use the threat of a make believe character to influence my children’s behaviour. And I did it today. 

The whole idea of lists and naughty and nice gets more and more tricky for me. We get our children to become good people by lying to them. I am all for the magic of Christmas and presents and stockings but I do think that morality shouldn’t feature in the whole Father Christmas yarn. And I think we should also just throw in the towel when it comes to trying to link our contemporary Christmas to the birth of Christ. 

I have written about the link between creativity, imagination and faith previously and I think that being prepared to believe in that which we cannot see is a fundamental tenant of our faith. I just want to try and make my children want to be better people because of Jesus and not a man in a moth eaten old costume. 

These days when I put my children to sleep Eva invariably wants a story about fairies and bunnies and I delight that her imagination in the unseen is developing. When I put Gray to sleep, however, my stories are not my own. He is old enough to hear the most powerful yarns of all. The stories that are beyond belief - people coming back to life, giants, empty chariots floating in the middle of a recently flooded sea, a star leading men from afar to a baby born of a virgin. And Gray will often find me in tears after telling him these stories because, unlike all the stories I’ve made up in my past, I really do believe in these ones. And I really do believe that there is only One who sees us when we’re sleeping, who knows when we’re awake, who knows if we’ve been bad or good and who forgives us for His own sake.