This Christmas, no fewer than 15 children in the O’Reilly clan will receive lovingly crafted letters from Rufus Frost, secretary to Santa and his most trusted elf
The envelope is deep and rich and red, gleaming darkly like the brushed felt of an Edwardian billiard table. Had its recipient any class, it would be savoured, appreciated, perhaps even pulled close and sniffed. This sleeve has, after all, travelled many thousands of miles to get here and done so via mysterious means. Yes, it bears a stamp in its top right corner, a hand-drawn image of an elf, but it’s also unblemished by postmark or seal. Of course, none of this is relevant in any case, since it isn’t destined to be examined, but immediately annihilated, to reveal the true prize inside.
This is how it goes for my nephews and nieces (henceforth, niblings) each Christmas morn, when my packages finally reach their grubby little paws. Issued directly from the North Pole, these are their own, personal and private letters from Santa Claus, featuring a letter from his head elf, a thorough rundown on goings-on in the workshop, and some TOP SECRET toy designs in development at Santa’s research lab. A side note: in one of the peculiarities of our statelet’s divorce, Northern Irish people don’t refer to “Father Christmas” but “Santa Claus”, much like the rest of the island. We’re happy to adopt Anglocentric phenomena like Boxing Day or caroling, but Father Christmas – which sounds like a silly British name an American sitcom has made up, like Lord Giftington, or Percy Presents QC – is a step too far.
When I started, my 10 siblings had a combined eight children. Since then – and seemingly out of spite – they’ve sired six more. I’ve also just had a baby son of my own, meaning this year’s count will be 15. Back In 2014, I was in a different place in a lot of other ways, too. I was working in a job that was about as nourishing to the soul as ordering bin bags from Hackney Council, and a good deal less creative. In fact it was a job that actively discouraged creativity. Meetings were called about my email font choices and I once got a verbal warning about my socks. The entire time I worked there, the only creative muscle I flexed was in coming up with increasingly preposterous reasons to call in sick. I never did, for example, get wasp flu from a trampoline accident that time.
My Christmas letters were a refuge. For one thing, they allowed me to indulge in my lifelong passion for misappropriating workplace stationery but, more importantly, they carved a sweet respite from the drudgery of my own lowered expectations. Then, and each year since, my annual dispatches from Arctic Holdings Ltd gave me the space to create something both silly and meaningful, stupid yet profound. More than that, they allowed me to infect my favourite little people with the same joy I got from Christmas as a child.
And that joy was real. For those who have suffered the loss of a parent, Christmas can be hard. I’m wary of making us sound like a Dickensian fable, in which my father removes his top hat like Bob Cratchit spying Tiny Tim’s empty place at the dinner table; a gesture so dignified that we, his infant children, pause from boiling a giant goose to remove our own top hats as well. But, looking back, our story was quite dramatic, and shaped the formative Christmases of my life. My mother died 10 weeks before Christmas 1991 and the glory of my dad’s example was his indefatigable ability to work and play and love through the pain. Not just because he had to – and, with 11 kids between two and 17 years old, I suppose he really did have to – but because life is great if you don’t weaken, and work, love and play are grief’s only cure. As a result of his labours, my only abiding memory from that Christmas is of receiving a John Deere pedal tractor that was so perfect, everything else has been blocked out. I can’t imagine how hard a road it was, all I remember is the magic that was conjured for me through each heavy step. Whatever little scintilla of that I can replicate via elves, gravy shoes and fart gags, I reckon it’s worth trying.
“Dear Human Child,” reads the first letter to fall from the package, on nondescript headed paper, bearing the inscription: Arctic Holdings Ltd, A Subsidiary of North Pole Leisure and Logistics Co. “My name is Rufus Frost,” it continues. “I work at the North Pole as Santa’s second-in-command here at the workshop. A lot of people refer to me as his most trusted elf. I have a special badge and everything.” Rufus is a legalistic sort, and each child’s initial entry point to the world of Santa’s workshop. Since they exist at the whim of preposterous adult rules, children have a finely attuned sense for bureaucratic absurdity and are very much taken with the pomp and ceremony of this fussy little elf who insists on being first among equals on the shopfloor. Beneath that snooty exterior lies a heart that’s as golden as his little badge, a fact evidenced by the delight he takes in announcing the good news to his recipient. “Obviously Santa gets millions of letters each year – and he reads every single one! – but sometimes the letters he receives are so special that he feels he simply must give a personal response.”
Most of the impetus for the entire project can be summed up in those opening few sentences. I like the thought of each nibling feeling personally chosen because of their letters, to feel like someone from the realm of myth and magic is reaching out and making them feel part of their world. And all the better if that world feels real, detailed and lived in. Every letter from Rufus carries a footer of small print that might only be noticed after a third or fourth reading, maybe even years later, but without which they would be sorely lacking. “Any and all contact to this address may be used by our staff for training porpoises” I wrote in 2016. “That’s right – porpoises. We have some here on work placement as diversity hires, so we got them started in the mailroom. I don’t mind telling you this has not been a great success. Their lack of limbs has proven a serious drawback and, though highly intelligent, if you turn your back on them for one second, I swear to God they’ll have that beach ball bouncing about the place again. Also, the mailroom is absolutely soaked and a lot of their clicking noises sound dismissive and sarcastic. On the plus side, the narwhal they sent us has been fantastic. Between letter-opening, litter-picking and the popping of beach balls, his 10ft tusk is a welcome addition to the workforce.” Rufus is also ecologically responsible, and insists “any coal sent back to us will be reused to teach and/or shame other naughty children or deployed as eyes/shiny black buttons for snowmen”.
After that comes a letter from Santa himself, which cribs from the interests of my niblings, or the contents of their letters, to add extra details; anything from his latest weight-loss regime to his fondness for ballet or his past history as a scurrilous pirate. Santa is full of twinkly eyed mischief and gentle ribbing, keen to shed new light on the precarious mechanics of toy design and unveil a variety of stunning new creations, like Princess Lumberjack (the gender-fluid forestry royal with her collection of detachable beards), Squi-Jamas (tartan bedwear for squid, cannily repurposed from bagpipes), and Gravy Shoes which are, you’ll be stunned to discover, shoes filled with gravy. Most of these are in my own handwriting, supplemented with my own variably adequate drawings. This means my wife has to sign any cards or gifts for my niblings for the rest of the year, since anything written in my own hand would betray me as their scribe.
Sometimes I’ve gone for a slightly more involved process, like when my niece Aoife discovered the Harry Potter books, and requested all manner of Potter-related objects. I’d seen that she had started writing her own Potter fanfiction, the majestically titled Ace Moloney and the Dragon Hallway. So I asked my illustrator pal Peter O’Sullivan to help bring said tome to life with a fully crafted dust jacket and frontispiece, turning her crayon design into something approaching its final form. This I finished off with blurb quotes on the back from JK Rowling (“A triumph”), Ray Winstone (“Superb!”) and The Queen (“I literally farted”). As always, the secret to making magic come alive is of knowing when to deploy dollops of well-placed realism like these.
The Christmas magic of my childhood was of a simpler sort since my dad is neither a fabulist nor a natural spinner of yarns. If it was your sincere desire to keep a secret from Joe O’Reilly, your best bet would be to package it inside a story he enjoyed hearing from one of his favourite presenters on BBC Radio Ulster. “What is it he said?” he’ll ask himself out loud, laughing down the phone as you sit on the other end, considering the eternal mysteries of time itself. “I think the gist was there was a big turn-up at the funeral. That is to say, a ‘turnip’, because it was a carrot that died… Oh wait, did I mention it was a carrot that died?” No, aside from that time he reversed the car and said: “Ahhhh, this takes me back,” my dad’s only bravura comic performance was each Christmas, when we’d stalk him for our presents, traditionally shared after Mass. Actually, they were shared a little bit after Mass since my dad would first insist on taking “the scenic route”, a Machiavellian detour which took an agonising three extra minutes to reach home.
Once there, we’d stream past him like a scabby band of naughty spaniels, only to find an extra layer of theatrical misdirection; the door to the good room locked, and he ambling slowly toward it. Patting his trouser pockets in a perfect pantomime of a fumbling attendant, he’d look mystified. “Did I leave the key in Mass?” he’d deadpan, over our steadily increasing objections. By now he would be squinting thoughtfully as his fingers shuffled through a preposterously overladen key fob which, thinking back, he must have prepared for just this purpose. After fiddling with the lock for a while – if memory serves, this regularly took as long as a fortnight – we would finally gain entry to the room, spilling on to the carpet around a bin bag filled with presents. There we’d see the mince pie and carrot – both nibbled by Santa and Rudolf respectively – beside a small tumbler of whiskey that had a little bit drunk from it, but not so much – we figured – that it would impede Santa’s ability to drive. It was all real, and alive. It was magic. Looking back, almost nothing we received could better the ecstatic clamour of him barring our entry while we cackled. I say almost nothing since, honestly, that John Deere pedal tractor really was outstanding.
Of course, no magic lasts forever. My nephews Finnian and Malachy once delighted over the football sticker album I made for them – after one of my finest ever office stationery raids – which boasted players such as Emile Huskie and Ugo Eggy Nog, drawn from Arctic League titans like Winter Milan and Queens Park Reindeers. And then came last year, and the unavoidable sense that they were now wise to the ruse. Rather than a chatty letter to their dear pal Santa, they each submitted a 15-point list of their demands, like a surly little paramilitary organisation. According to my calculations, in the next few years, we’ll see the golden window of true believers close shut a little, at least until the next baby boom kicks off. Regardless, I have 15 letters to write this year and, even if the end is now in sight for some, I reckon I have many more years taking small liberties with my smallest relatives, and the smallest of small print.
Source：The Guardian.