Reblogged from Jim Webster:

Obviously with a title like this there is perhaps the thought that this blog is going to wander off into territory of the professional eroticist. With Santa there, dressed like that, who knows what sort of present you’re going to find yourself unwrapping?

But strangely enough, you might say that metaphorically I was interested not so much in the present as in the wrapping paper.

It was Pilate who asked, “What is truth?” But then he made damned sure he went out before anybody had time to answer his question.

You’ll see later that my title, ‘Out of the mouths of babes, is ‘truth’. Yet if I’d said ‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” it would have been ‘more true.’ Ironically that phrase comes from the chap who was asked by Pilate, “What is truth.”

So suddenly we’ve got relative truth; some truth is more true than other truths?
And the Father Christmas? Well he/she will appear later as well, in circumstances where I cannot be entirely sure of her/his gender (however self identified.)

My later mother loved teaching and she taught the little ones and liked them best before they were of an age to lie convincingly.

She told of one small boy who was given the task of ‘finishing off the well known proverb.’ Given “Where there’s a will…….” He supplied, “There’s an argument.” A well adjusted son of the Cumbrian farming industry if you ask me.

But there was the other side to it. My mother expected boys to be mischievous. For her that was normal. To be honest she didn’t mind girls being mischievous either, she regarded it as healthy. But at that age she could spot something darker and deeper within the child. I remember her coming home, putting her bag down and saying, “That child will hang.”

It was only a change in the law which meant that twenty years later ‘that child’ was imprisoned, not executed.

But still, she loved the honesty of small children. I think it’s something a lot of teachers treasure. A friend of mine told me about a colleague’s experience.

“She’s was having a language lesson with her class of 5/6 year olds, trying to elicit words beginning with ‘H’. She was hoping for the word ‘horrible’ which would then be a lead-in to shared reading of a book. So she said, “If we were playing together and I said I didn’t like you and didn’t want to be your friend, what would I be?”

Little voice from the back.

“Honest?”

Keep reading: Out of the mouths of babes