Editor – One of my favourite holiday traditions used to be sending letters to Father Christmas as a child.
My parents used to make a whole song and dance about it.
We would spend days writing the perfect letter, with mum and dad gently guiding us to only asking for presents they knew we would get.
It truly was a family bonding experience. Once the letters were done, we would launch them up into the sky attached to firework rockets.
This was normally done with much pomp and ceremony on Guy Fawkes.
As the rockets trailed into the air, the rush of excitement began.
My brother and I could talk about little else for days afterwards… It was a simple thing our parents did that made a world of difference.
Nowadays, children know at a very young age that Santa Claus is not real, thanks to Mr Google.
In fact, many of life’s feel-good moments have been destroyed by Mr Google and his ilk.
The Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy have all but died.
As a parent, I tried to keep Easter alive as long as possible until I realised all my clever hiding of Easter eggs was greeted with great amusement by my children, whose only desire to keep me believing they still thought the Easter Bunny was real was to get better Easter eggs.
They figured that as soon as we realised they no longer “believed”, the number of eggs would diminish. They were right, of course, but still it was sad to see it end so early in their childhood.
As young children, we need fantasy to build, explore and grow.
I can remember as a child when a broom and a cardboard box became a boat, and the living room floor a vast ocean to explore, with the sofa and chairs as islands.
But thanks to Mr Google, imaginary worlds like that no longer exist. It scares me that our children are growing up too fast these days.
We barely give them time to be children before we rip it all away with the tree of knowledge that is Mr Google.
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