Have you ever thought about how many names Santa has? There’s not just Santa, Santa Claus or Mr Claus - there is quite a range and sometimes children get confused when Santa is called something else in a book or story.

Here are some of the most ocmmon names for the jolly man who loves chidlren and makes their Christmases special…

Santa Claus - or Santa for short - or Santo Clos (in Mexico)

St Nicholas - or St Nick for short (also spelt Nikolas)

Father Christmas or Pere Noel (in French) or Pare Noel (in Spanish) or Noel Baba (in Turkish)

Sinterklaas (Dutch variation of Saint Nicholas and believed to be the origins of Santa Claus))

Kris Kringle

Odin ( a Germanic God also associated with Christmas)

Tomte or Nisse (Nordic folklore names)

Neclaus

Grandfather Christmas

Grandfather Frost or Father Frost

Papai Noel (in Brazil) translates as Father Noah

Are there any others you know of?

My little girl was nearly two for the first Christmas she really appreciated. I was a single dad and really wanted her to enjoy the day.

She woke up at her usual time (about 8 or 8.30 I think) and I went in to see her. She was happily standing in her cot waiting for me when I walked in with a borrowed video camera filming her.

I put the camera down to open her cot and slide the armchair to be next to the cot - Santa had left her stocking on the chair rather than in her cot (i guess he was as safety conscious as me!)

She babbled away to me like any other day while I filmed her and tried to direct her attention to the chair. It seemed to take forever before she finally realised there was something interesting on the chair…

She looked up as if to see if she was allowed to touch the mysterious things that had appeared over night. I smiled and she was into it!

We then went through her stocking together and had a lovely morning with her stocking until her Grandparents arrived with more presents.

When she was very young, my daughter decided we were making “5 cent biscuits” for Santa. I have no idea where she got the name from or what it meant to her, but the name has stuck and we leave out 5 cent biscuits for Santa every year.

Everyone else (and us the rest of the year!) call them shortbread so I thought I’d share our recipe with you - it’s pretty simple and my kids have helped make them from an early age.

5 cent biscuits recipe

You need:

250g butter (or margarine)

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

1/3 cup of castor sugar

2 cups plain flour

4 Tablespoons rice flour

You do:

Preheat oven to 180 Celsius

grease an oven tray

Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla (that means beat them together until they are pale yellow and fluffy)

add flour and mix

knead the dough well on a lightly floured bench/board

shape shortbread*

Prick shortbread surface with a fork

bake at 160 Celsius (yep, lower than the preheat temp) for 15 - 20 minutes

remove from oven when starting to colour

cool

sprinkle with icing sugar, dip in chocolate or leave plain.

* you can roll out the dough and make 4 saucer-sized circles, cut into 8 pieces per circle OR you can let the kids use shaped cutters to make fun 5 cent biscuits. Individual biscuits cook a little faster than the circles.

It is getting close now - one week to Christmas Eve and Santa’s arrival Down Under to help create some more Christmas memories.

As Santa is flying across Australia, our Air Control Towers will be keeping planes and other air traffic out of Santa’s way so there are no nasty surprises for anyone.

Apparently, Santa has a new sleigh with added safety features - you can see pictures ot Santa and diagrams of his sleigh (click on the labels below the diagram for a full explanation) on the Air Services website’s Santa pages.

Due to this being the most popular flight in Australia, Air Services will continue tracking Santa’s progress everyday until Christmas.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house no one could remember the names of Santa’ reindeer:)

For anyone else trying to remember the names to tell the kids or win Trivial Pursuit here they are:

• Prancer
• Dancer
• Donner
• Blitzen
• Dasher
• Vixen
• Commet
• Cupid
• and, of course, Rudolph

But I also heard that it would take more than 214,000 reindeers to pull a sleigh of 333,333 tons (based on one soft toy per child I think it was) Now there is no way I’m going to list out 214,000 reindeer names, even if I had a hope of knowing them all!

Of course, whoever did those calculations didn’t factor in the magic of Santa or the white boomers so the 9 names above are enough for me!

We’re a bit behind this year so my kids have just written their letters to Santa. This was something I did every year as a kid and now my kids do it.

It personalises the whole thing and is fun and exciting - I can even justify it as writing practice seeing as the older kids have written letters at school or for homework this year!

I take a copy of their letters - photocopy or scan it - as their messages and spelling can be so creative I don’t want to loose them when we mail the letters to Santa. Their letters go into their scrapbooking albums (when I says their, I mean mine about them!) opposite the letters they receive from Santa to reinforce their memories later on.

I wish my mum had kept copies of the my old letters - I think it would be quite amusing to read them and they will make an interesting piece of history.

Yesterday on a long drive, both my kids fell asleep in the car. After about an hour, my nearly 6 year old woke with a start telling me he’d just had a lovely big sleep and had a wonderful dream.

He dreamt there were lots of Santas in the world, making sure all the kids had “the most” presents.

I thought that was lovely, and spot on.

Six white boomers, snow white boomers,
racing Santa Claus through the blazing sun…

(from Six White Boomers by R Harris & J Brown)

So what is a white boomer? It is a large, male Kangaroo that has white fur. When they move fast across the dry sands of Australia, they make a booming noise so they earned the name boomers. Most boomers are not white by the way

In Australia, Christmas Eve can be hot - and it certainly isn’t cold and snowy. Santa’s poor reindeer would find it very hard to pull a sleigh across the Australian skies so he gives them a rest while six large boomers pull the sleigh instead. The boomers can’t fly normally, but with Santa’s magic, anything is possible.

Rolf Harris made this story famous in the 1960s by releasing his version of six white boomers. You can see the lyrics on Rolf’s website (it would be a copyright infringement if we copied the words here!)

If you are creative, you may like the instructions on painting some white boomers of your own.

When I was about 6, I feel out of bed on Christmas Eve taking the mattress and blankets with me! Santa arrived to deliver presents and helped me - he lifted the bedding and me back onto the bed! He did it so well I didn’t even stir.

I don’t remember how I knew this - I guess Mum and Dad told me the next morning after Santa told them - but I knew it was a fact and I loved Santa for it

Santa left our pressies in a pillowcase at the end of our beds.

In the morning, we would wiggle our toes like crazy to hear the scrunching noise of a pillowcase full of wrapped gifts. We had strict instuctions that presents could only be opened if the sun was up…so we would use our toes to feel the presents.

Growing up, I saw too many kids being forced to sit on Santa’s knee for a photo, so I decided when I had kids I would only get a photo done on their first Christmas.

My second son was born exactly a week before Christmas. Two days before Christmas I took him to the shopping centre to get his photo taken. I have the most beautiful photo of him at 5 days old fast asleep on Santa’s knee. The photographer even zoomed in a bit so it’s just my son and Santa.

When I was a kid, before Mum got us some “proper” stockings, we used to use Dads socks (clean ones). One year, one of my brothers decided they weren’t big enough - so he decided to put up a pillow case. Not to be out done by his big brother, my other brother decided a doona cover was a much better idea…

Both boys were disappointed, however, because neither the pillow case or doona were full of gifts! They still received the same number of gifts they would have received with the sock.