Are You Santa's Brother?

I had heard of Mrs. Claus, the elves who help Santa assemble his load of toys and the reindeer, of course, but I never knew Santa had a brother until we had a visit from some French Canadian friends. Bob, Isabelle and their little daughter Claude, who were enjoying the novelty of their first Australian Summer Christmas, spent a few days at the coast with us last year. Claude, a charming two year old, only spoke French except when, in dire emergencies, "Mama" was replaced by loud wails of "Mummy."

Bob expressed some surprise when, for the first day or so, Claude treated me very circumspectly. I told him I suspected that, like other small children at that time of year, she was wondering if I could possibly be that other white bearded old gentleman who had received so much recent publicity. I confessed that, during of the lead up to Christmas, one small girl passing me in the main street had confided to her mother in a very audible whisper, "Look, Mummy, it's Santa." I had pretended not to hear and walked straight to the barber's shop for a haircut and beard trim. But, since then, both my hair and my beard had grown again, and I would need to visit the hairdresser when the holidays were over.

Our visitors wanted to swim. Rather than taking them to the beach, we took them to a part of the river estuary where there is plenty of sand and a broad expanse of shallow water in which little kids can play safely, with deeper water further out for the adults. The only other people there that day were two small boys about five or six years old, who may or may not have been brothers. They were running wild while the young woman, in whose charge they seemed to be, sat with her nose buried in a book. Its title: Bringing Up Boys.

The boys decided it would be fun to splash, annoy and generally intimidate Claude, who looked at them blankly when they shouted at her in their very Aussie English. Bob's civil requests that they stop were ignored both by the boys and by the book reading young woman until he said, "See that old man over there? He's Santa's brother and he's watching you. He'll tell Santa if he sees you being naughty."

It worked like magic. They eyed me warily and went off to sit under the trees on the bank until, after some whispered discussion, one of them came back into the water and asked me truculently, "Is what he said true? Are you really Santa's brother?"

"No," I replied, "He's my brother."

That rather Irish statement seemed to convince him. He looked at me very respectfully and went off to report to his companion. For the rest of the morning they only engaged in anything like their previous boisterous behavior when they thought I wasn't watching.