Obviously, as fully paid up Brits, presents in our gaff get delivered by the big man in red on Christmas Eve, so long as you leave a mince pie, a healthy shot of something alcoholic and some carrots for the reindeer. But for our kids' friends, Santa (or Papa Noel) is a jolly fellow who gets hauled around the village on the back of a tractor chucking sweets at the kids, the real players are the three kings.
But what happens when your kids start to confer with their peers? "Why do you get presents from Santa Claus?", "Why do you get your Christmas presents practically two weeks before we do?".
The questions come back... "why don't the three kings bring us any presents?"
The latter is easily resolved - "do you want to wait an extra 12 days for your presents?"
This clash of cultures, where we are basically lying through our teeth to our offspring, is fraught. You have to add multiple layers of fallacies to make the whole thing even remotely conceivable. I have tried to explain this huge difference in cultures away by saying that Santa can't possibly deliver ALL of the presents to ALL of the children in one night, so, you know, the three kings pick up some of the slack.
"But why are they so late?".... "Erm, Spain innit! Mañana, mañana."
However, my keen-eyed pedants are quick to call me out on this when tracking Santa's progress via t'interweb apps on Christmas Eve, although they strangely don't question how quick he can cover entire continents or his rather random route.
"Well, he has to deliver to all the British kids who don't live in Britain...."
Occasionally, the three kings can be quite useful - particularly when we spend Christmas in the UK but the presents we want to give our kids are larger than the average suitcase can handle on budget airlines. In these instances, we can call upon the three kings to deliver oversized parcels directly to Spain - Santa has a word and calls in a favour. This, however, means me having to leave the Christmas tree up until the 6th of January when I'm fucked off to the back teeth of the thing and want rid of all the sparkly shit.
The strangest thing about the difference in the British and Spanish culture concerning gift giving is their timing - yeah I know it's the 3 kings (or wise men as I was brought up with), following yon star etc... etc.. who didn't rock up to Jerusalem with their shite and not very practical gifts until 12 days after the birth, but dealing with the here and now, the poor buggers break up from school on the 22nd of December and don't receive their presents until the 6th of January. They then have to return to school two days later! Practically three bastard weeks of wishing they had a new skateboard, PS4 games, bike, Girls World to play with during this time.
Thankfully the oldest is beyond all this nonsense, having been told by his best mate (cheers Ivan) a few years ago that the 3 kings didn't exist. Being the bright boy that he is, he naturally deduced that Santa must also be a big fat lie.
The girl is just six and is at the prime age for the entering into the spirit of Christmas and believing in all the magic, and I am more than happy to go along with it and come up with random on the spot embellishments to try to bring the two cultures together. It won't be too long before she too, no longer believes and the only thing she questions is the decision to "black up" whichever local who is playing Balthazar in the village precession the night before Epiphany.
