The Briggs Father Christmas book was one of my kids' favourites. We'd read it together, especially as The Time grew near. Must've gone through quite a few copies! There's still a tatty one in the loft somewhere.
It was quite controversial on its publication. Briggs' Father Christmas isn't a Disneyfied character with a huge staff of busy elves. He lives in an Edwardian terraced house, like the one Briggs' parents owned when he was a child.
Some miserable old twat critic panned it for showing the hero performing an act of personal hygiene. It was one of the kids' favourite scenes! That critic can't have brought up children.
The sequel is good too, when Father Christmas Goes On Holiday. For year my kids'd look out for him on beaches!
I remember the animation from my childhood--the one that fuses both of the stories from the book into one. Miss Yith and I caught it last Christmas while back in the UK.
The central conceit that Father Christmas could be 'just a chap trying to get his work done so he can sit down and put his feet up' is charming. I think it plays into the the plausibility of his existence for younger children.
With a combination of my answers to her questions, the general mythology and some thinking for herself, Miss Yith has assembled a pretty rounded idea of Father Christmas: he's somewhat like Jesus and Buddha, but unlike them he's still alive because he doesn't get older. The Father Christmases that she has visited in grottos are usually his assistants (who help out because of the size of his job), but one of them
might have been the real one as his assistants look and act much the same as their boss, but nobody ever knows for sure. We know of course, that he likes mince pies and beer or wine, and the one she met last Christmas said that he liked to have a beer when he'd finished his deliveries, so he's a possible candidate...
Apparently, Briggs based the character on his own father, a milkman, who appeared alongside his mother in
Ethel & Ernest (they also formed the basis for the characters in
When The Wind Blows), but there are also shades of his
Gentleman Jim, the imaginative toilet cleaner: something about the nobility of doing your job properly--albeit it a humble one--in spite of petty bureaucracy and selfish people, never losing your humour or giving up on your dreams completely.
Keep Buggering On, as Churchill had it.
