THE LAST STRAW/Frank McNally: Far be it from me to second-guess Santa Claus, the supreme authority in these matters but I'm sure that when my three-year-old son opens his presents on Christmas Day, there won't be a toy gun among them.
I understand the thinking behind this, and I don't for a moment doubt Santa's good sense - it's part of the reason I married her. And yet I can't help feeling that in these over-sensitive times, boys like Patrick miss out on the excitement that, in more carefree Christmases, we knew.
I don't want to turn this into a Barry's Golden Moment or anything. But when I think back to Christmas Day mornings from my own childhood in Monaghan, some of the happiest memories are of hours spent trying to kill my younger brother.
This was an ongoing project, of course, and not confined to mid-December. The exciting thing at Christmas was that you appeared to have official sanction for it.
In those days, your presents typically included a gleaming, silver revolver, as used in westerns. If you were lucky, you got "caps" as well, little rolls of cardboard dotted with sulphur that fitted in the chamber and made a bang when you fired. Your six-gun loaded, you could track your brother across the badlands (the upstairs landing), chase him down a ravine (the stairs), perhaps corner him near a small wooded area (the Christmas tree) as he made for the river, before shooting him like the dog he was. Even now, I love the smell of sulphur in the morning.
For some reason, these toys were not popular with parents. And if memory serves, Santa's arms shipments to Monaghan dried up around 1972. The ammunition was first to go - we had to revert to making our own sound effects one year - and a complete weapons ban followed. Maybe events elsewhere had an influence: we were dimly aware then that, a few miles away, other kinds of "boys" were giving violence a bad name. But perhaps we ourselves moved on, toy-wise, trying to keep pace with classmates who were getting chemistry sets, equipment for laundering diesel, etc.
These days, Santa not only tends to avoid guns (a development which, as we know, has led to world peace) but often favours toys that stretch the traditional gender boundaries; to encourage nurturing instincts in boys, say, or construction skills in girls. As all parents know, this is futile. Eventually, your daughter adapts the Bob the Builder dump-truck for use as a pram, and your son starts using the tea-set for target practice.
When playing soccer with Patrick, I used to make a point of involving his sister Roisín (4), lest she feel excluded. But then she kept picking the ball up and trying to introduce rules to make the game less aggressive, which just ruined it for the rest of us. So now we play when she's distracted by other pursuits, such as making daisy-chains.
By contrast, even at three, Patrick will occasionally pick up something - a banana, or the L-shape from the set of educational fridge magnets - and start shooting with it. We blame television, but I'm not sure why. I've never seen violence on the Teletubbies or Tweenies, and the scene in which Barney is brutally gunned down by a crazed parent who can't stand his adenoidal whining any more is something which happens only in my daydreams.
It's true that, recently, my son has become fascinated with Roisín's play-kitchen. He slaves before it, mixing ingredients, and serving us the pictures of dinners that came with the set. But the crucial thing is that while the meals are make-believe, the ingredients are not. So it seems to me that - rather than being a budding super-chef - he has just realised he can get away with mess-related activity - under the cover of "cooking" - that is otherwise discouraged.
This ground-rule gets forgotten, frequently. During his dinner the other day, I noticed him having a mischievous idea.
When a child has a mischievous idea, a flashing light-bulb suddenly appears over its head. So, carefully, I watched him slink away from the table with the yoghurt drink and, before I could intervene, pour it into the boot of his pedal-car.
Fortunately, I was able to thwart the rest of the plan, which I have reason to believe involved mashed potato and peas. But this is exactly the sort of experiment he can conduct freely in his "kitchen". And with parental indulgence, he has gradually extended the range of materials to include, recently, the spice rack from the real kitchen. At this rate, it's only a matter of time before he creates gunpowder.
The play-kitchen is a popular toy, clearly. But even so, as I was saying to Santa the other day, it might be time we started cutting down the ammunition supply.