Christmas is on the horizon
Slipping into the costume of memory, sixtyish Christmases past start with new dresses mother made, white sprigged with blue violets, and dolls like hard plastic Mary who fell out of bed, broke her head and was forever scarred with orange plasticine.
The first bicycle, little and blue with a basket, Father Christmas left (wrapped in brown paper) amazingly indoors. Miraculously he must have delivered bikes to every child on the Central Fire Station too because that morning the big yard whirled and whooped with kids learning to ride..
There were train sets with tiny tunnels and villages; churches lush with incantations, big hats and incense; oranges, chocolates and the ritual Christmas morning trip in the chief's car ('49 Ford single spinner with siren) with dad and my bro, around outlying stations for obligatory festive drinks at each, while Mum flapped the pinny over a hot oven at home and yelled blue murder when we rolled in late and merry as lords.
The best china came out, there were lucky threepences in the pudding and afterwards, while Mum and the tipsy pretend-aunts lay down exhausted for naps in their petticoats, unusually the fathers did the dishes while we kids swam.
Distant nanas with spidery handwriting sent exotic lollies and cigars were compulsory, although admittedly the Father Christmas of the time was partly the Clement C Moore version from The Night Before Christmas - "The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath" - and partly the spirit of AA Milne's King John's Christmas - "King John was not a good man" - who brought him a big red India-rubber ball anyway.
Next we were the mums and dads, up nights for weeks making secret presents, starting a decorations collection still brought out each year full of forgotten shiny treasures, ceremonially hunting feral trees from local roadsides, bravely putting on the pinny to bake tarts and glaze ham, and starting excellent new traditions such as champagne with strawberries for breakfast and, in new favourite Christmas haunts with friends, pipis steamed open over hot corrugated iron, long Boxing Day swims behind dinghies full of kids, dads and food to island picnics, or lying in warm shallows at dusk listening to music played around a bonfire on the beach.
Once, after everyone grew up, died or was busy elsewhere, I spent a Christmas with no family of my own present. The people who took me in were lovely but I still cried buckets.
Now there's another generation to hang up stockings and leave carrots for reindeer.
I may be a cynical curmudgeonly old sceptic in all matters of science, religion, white-man's medicine and politics but I'm a firm believer in Father Christmas.
If memory is costume, Christmas is a gala performance, so three cheers for production crews in whanau everywhere busily juggling impossible lists on shoestrings and a shrinking deadline in the stinking heat to keep lighting up the magic.