Perhaps it was my unwavering belief in Santa that made me as scared of him as I was excited. I was terrified of him. I was also terrified of being terrified because I felt that if he knew I was terrified he wouldn’t like me and wouldn’t give me presents. The songs we sang at school wrapped me in a film of festive terror. The threat that this old man could see me when I was sleeping, knew when I was awake, and was assiduously tracking my behaviour was enough to keep me awake from Halloween to Boxing Day.
There was also the Christmas tradition that I learned about from films and TV, of hanging your stocking on the end of your bed for Santa to fill with presents. My stocking was left on the fireplace but that wasn’t enough to calm my fear that Santa would come into my room. Maybe he would forget and think I was one of the kids who did the bed knob thing and come to check?
Thank God I lived in a time before Elf on the Shelf. What a creepy, threatening, weird concept. As if the idea of Santa spying on you when you are asleep isn’t scary enough, kids now have a 24/7 Christmas security camera on them whenever they are in a room that has a ledge. One year I wrote a letter to Santa that said something close to: “Dear Santa, Did you get my last letter? I just wanted to tell you please can you give me no surprises this year and can you please not come into my room. I will leave my stocking on top of your milk glass so you see it and don’t need to come into my room. PS I am really good. Stefanie.”
Endless letters were posted to the north pole to calm my fears of anything vaguely unplanned happening, However, one day it all came to an end and I realised that Santa being real was not as traumatising as him being fake.
I was eating the nougat half of a Double Decker chocolate bar when Naomi Byrne ruined my childhood. Naomi was getting me to put blue mascara in her hair. She was eating the crunchy part of the chocolate bar as I negotiated the electric sapphire streaks with one hand, careful not to drop my chocolate.
There was silence in the lead-up to The Big Reveal. I’m not sure what her thought process was (I try to hope she didn’t intend to ruin my life, she probably had no idea the effect the next sentence would have on me). “You know Santa isn’t real, don’t you?”
Just like that. Poof. My childhood pulled apart like the two layers of the chocolate bar we split between us. I dropped the mascara. Some of it went on my My Little Pony bedspread. I balled my fists by my side, and did a mighty foot stamp at Naomi. “SANTA IS REAL, NAOMI!” Without giving her the space to back up her argument with facts, I demanded she help me wipe the mascara off my duvet. We did it together in silence. I actually can’t remember speaking a single syllable to Naomi since that moment.
When Naomi had left I bombed down the stairs to confront my mother. I was doing it in the hope that she would yet again confirm that Naomi was just another hopeless case destined for coal and empty stockings. “Mam, Naomi says Santa isn’t real.” My mother has since told me that in the minutes that passed between my statement and her response she was doing fast maths. My mother quickly calculated the months to Christmas and hazarded that I would be over the trauma. She feverishly set my age against the possible number of years a child can believe and decided to hit me with the truth. “She’s right, Stef. He’s not.”
She thought I really wanted to hear the truth. I never want to hear the truth. My statement to my mother hadn’t even been a vague hunch. It was not a question. I was not looking for answers. And yet there it was. The answer to the question I never asked.
It didn’t sting any less when Christmas came around that year. The only thing that had changed was that I was now eating both halves of the Double Decker bar myself and blue mascara had gone out of fashion.
• Stefanie Preissner is an actor, and creator and writer of the comedy TV series Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope
