Childish things Santa Claus ain’t coming to town: is childhood innocence worth preserving?

O ne of my earliest childhood memories: I am maybe six or seven, and it is Easter Sunday morning. I wake up early and skip down the hall to my parents’ bedroom to rouse them from sleep so that we can get straight down to the egg hunt. My dad is still in bed dozing; my mum is nowhere to be seen. After prodding my dad for a bit, I go over to the windows overlooking the garden. I draw back the curtain to see if I can scope out any chocolate eggs that may be visible, perhaps even the Easter Bunny himself going about his work. Instead I see my mother in her dressing gown with a little basket of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs in one hand, crouching to place them here and there among planters and flower beds. What I am witnessing makes no sense at all. It flies in the face of everything I know to be true. Yet here it is, unfolding right in front of me, as unthinkable as it is irrefutable. Traumatised by my own expanding comprehension of what is happening, I turn to my drowsy father. “Mummy is the Easter Bunny!” I say, and burst into tears.

As losses of innocence go, this is enviably mild stuff. But in retrospect, what upset me most about this incident, this Revelation in the Garden, was my inchoate understanding that a part of my childhood had just subsided into the void. I knew, on some level, that this was the beginning of a long unravelling: the Easter Bunny was just the canary in the coalmine.

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