Santa

Holding a foreign affairs portfolio in the Federal Government means you travel… a lot. And with a young family this carries with it certain domestic challenges.

So a social contract has developed between me and my family to resolve the situation. Be it out of compensation or guilt, provided I return bearing gifts then everything is OK.

My wife Rachel is the easiest piece of the puzzle. I pass through Duty Free often which simply means cosmetics. Her favourite is nail polish which lives in the refrigerator. After a year of travelling the inside door of the fridge now has a line-up of tomato sauce, milk and a bank of Chanel.

Continue reading "Sometimes Santa isn’t that good at choosing presents…" »

Santa sucks.

It recently occurred to me that everyone eventually arrives at that same conclusion one way or the other.

I certainly did on Saturday, at precisely 12:36pm. Earlier that morning my wife and I packed up our two boys (one nearly 4 and the other 11 months) and headed off to our local shopping centre.

Continue reading "Can we get rid of this fat home intruder already?" »

Not enough people are applying for the job of Local Shopping Centre Santa. People are un-applying in plague proportions. Turns out being urinated on for four weeks by other peoples’ greedy brats isn’t such a hot ticket after all.

It may be that the ratio of children to deep-voiced jolly men with robust thighs is off. It could be that those that are around and available are worried about the potentially awkward and litigious practice of having children sit on your lap and ask you for presents.

Or of course for any children reading, it could be that there’s only one Santa, and he’s busy making peanut-free toys for you all at the North Pole. Probably hanging out with Jesus or something, I don’t know.

Continue reading "Ho, ho, ho! It’s a Father Christmas shortage!" »

There’s a high-risk derivative of the time-honoured “Secret Santa” that has become quite popular in recent years.  All the carefully (and not so carefully) selected gifts are pooled and one by one participants get to select and open a present.  They then face a choice: keep the present they’ve just opened or forfeit it and go for another, the contents of which are unknown but with which they will be stuck.

Ornately wrapped, carefully presented gift boxes adorned with bows and baubles are, unsurprisingly, first picks.  But they don’t often yield the best results.

However, it’s human to be tempted by the promise of something better, to be lured by the illusion of a grander prize.

Continue reading "Beware the electoral Santa bearing gifts" »

Surely it’s some kind of peer reviewed joke. A researcher at Monash university has published a paper in the British Medical Journal saying it’s time to re-think Santa because he’s an obese, speeding drink-driver who spreads disease and is therefore a bad role model.

Ditto, obviously, for the tooth fairy who is doing a roaring trade in body parts. And the Easter Bunny must be a bad role model too because he brings chocolate and also makes no sense. And the bogeyman, who has questionable hygiene and engages in the potentially deadly activity of climbing up on rooftops to make things go bump.

There are too many bad role models around kids, but they’re much more omnipresent than Santa. The morbidly obese, the lazy, the cheats and liars of the world are everywhere and tragically some kids see this behaviour in their homes 365 days a year. And that’s before you get to rugby league players and drug-addled Hollywood starlets.

Continue reading "Save Santa from wowsers" »