Bunny for whom the bell tolled

On a bus last week I overheard a young girl ask her mother would Santa need to show his Covid vaccine passport before climbing down the chimney.

Kids always get anxious about presents as Christmas approaches.

I know I always was.  One year, in particular, stands out.

I was ten. And well aware I should be existing in a post-fluffy toy world. But I had fallen in love with that sky-blue fluffy rabbit I had spotted in Glynn’s Toy shop in Galway City. And there were only eight shopping days ‘til Christmas.

Mother was understanding. Father was traumatised.

There was an additional problem. The fluffy rabbit had an internal bell. And anytime you picked up the fluffy rabbit in the shop,the bell rang. I didn’t like that. The bell reminded me that at my age I shouldn’t be even contemplating fraternising with this fluffy rabbit. That I should be acutely ashamed and embarrassed. That I should be requesting Scalextric or Lego as a present.

Or even Action Man.

That bell would have to be excised.

“No problem”, mother said. “Once we buy it, I can remove the bell from the bunny.”

Don’t call it a bunny. Just call it a rabbit.” I said.

Mother nodded and continued.

“I can open it up, remove the bell, sew it back up again with my needle and thread. Problem solved.”

I thought, ‘that’s all very well, Mother, but you are forgetting about your – legendary in family circles – inept sewing skills. I can’t let you go near that rabbit’.

Father’s sister, my auntie Cora, was a dab hand at embroidery and in former times a champion seamstress. She’d have to be approached. But there was a dilemma. Father did not want to publicise the fact, in front of his family, that his son who would turn eleven in February, wanted a sky blue fluffy rabbit for Christmas.

I made a suggestion: “Dad, just tell Auntie Cora, Horace is for Anne Marie.”

“Who? Oh. Jesus. Horace.”

Anne Marie was my younger sister. Seven years old. One problem. She was extremely precocious. Also, she happened to be in the room when I made the suggestion.

“No way, Dad. I wouldn’t be caught dead near that rabbit,” she announced while putting down her recent birthday present, a hardback edition of Crime and Punishment. “I don’t want you telling anybody I’d like a toy like that for Christmas! I would find that kind of behaviour hugely patronising and incredibly offensive!”

It was tough having Anne Marie as a sibling. So intellectually mature for her age, she was the one who told me there was no Santa Claus. (And she didn’t leave it there. In her explanatory speech the previous April she’d included another mythical figure who was an integral part of my childhood wellbeing. “Santa is a bit like God. A nice old fellow with a beard who doesn’t actually exist.”)

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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