‘Father Christmas and the Gift of Light,’ by Stephen Sayers (illustrated by Swea Sayers)
Review by Paul O’Kell
Dressed in cola red with a plastic face, Santa Claus offers commercial joy. The white-bearded old man of legend bestows gifts from teddy bears to computer fantasy worlds. This old tale – a fiction masquerading as fact for small children to believe – encourages parents to buy and buy, and already rich people to profit. A situation as staggeringly shallow as it is duplicitous, in which caring parents, perhaps remembering the disappointment of their own sad discovery years ago, perpetuate the existence of the nonexistent.
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