All I want for Christmas (aged four and a half)

I've been so excited about meeting him all day and now I'm with Father Christmas he doesn't seem very nice.  We've had to wait ages and Mummy had to ask a lady but now we're in his special room, behind a curtain where everything is bright red in a very big shop with stairs and everything, and he has a very loud voice.

"Have you been a good little girl?" he asks.  I nod, my eyes wide.  "Because only very good children get presents," he says.  I nod again.

"Well then, as you've been good - tell me, what do you want for Christmas?"

I look over at Mummy who is sitting in the corner in her fuzzy brown coat with the big buttons.  She smiles and I feel a bit less shy.  I do know what I want for Christmas and so does Mummy.  "Go on," she urges softly.

All I want for Christmas is.... big breath....

"A clockwork train set," I say quietly.

And this is why Father Christmas isn't very nice because he doesn't smile back, or laugh, or do anything that makes me believe he really is the best and that he is magic and loves children.  Instead he frowns and makes a funny hmmphing sound and I can smell his beard as he leans towards me.  "But little girls don't have train sets!" he says in his too loud voice.  He's not like I thought he would be and I think he's telling me off.  "That's a very funny thing for you to want.  Little boys have train sets, not little girls," he adds, as he reaches for one of the wrapped presents on the shelf by his side that is full of boxes of all shapes and sizes, although none of them are very big.  No train sets.

When we get home Mummy says I can open the present because it's not the real one - the real one will be inside my pillowcase at the end of the bed on Christmas Day.  The present from Father Christmas with the smelly beard is a Snakes and Ladders board.  I like it very much but I really hope a different, better Father Christmas - the proper one who comes down through the roof and magically gets in by the gas fire - will bring me the thing I truly want.

So there are two Father Christmases it seems.  There's the one who lives inside a shop and makes me feel like I must've been naughty because I asked for a train.  And there's the other one who I never see who fills the stripey pillowcase on Christmas Eve with presents which I don't know how he gets because the pretty tags on them say they are from Mummy and Daddy and my sister and Nanny and Granddad and other people too.  But I suppose he is like a postman really.  And this Father Christmas brings me the best Christmas present ever.  Much better than Snakes and Ladders.  It's clockwork with a big key in the side which twirls round and it has lots of wheels and carriages, some with little windows and a wagon for carrying coal, also Lego, and it goes round and round on a track that you clip together.

When I grow up I'll look back and realise that meeting Father Christmas was probably the start of my feminist tendencies.  A bloody sexist Santa!