Does becoming a mum in midlife make Christmas magical again? Our Fenwick Santa on the Rooftop experience

By the time you reach midlife, you know a bit too much about Christmas. The biggest thing is that you know what it costs. You know who bought the presents and you know somebody has to remember the batteries, book the tickets and work out where everyone is going to park.

Santa has an excellent back-office team. But becoming a mum at 40 changed Christmas for me, suddenly, I had Cyrus beside me noticing things I’d stopped noticing years ago. And our first visit to Santa on the Rooftop at Fenwick in Newcastle made me wonder whether Christmas magic actually disappears at all. I think we just need somebody smaller to point it out again.

Perhaps Christmas magic doesn’t disappear when we grow up. Perhaps we simply become too busy organising it to notice it.

Christmas tends to arrive faster than you expect, and that year I was determined not to miss out. Tickets were £12.50 each, and booking them gave me a thrill I hadn’t felt in years, back when festival tickets mattered more than sleep or sensible shoes.

This time, the excitement was quieter, certainly, but accompanied by that particular bit of mum anxiety about whether I’d actually manage to get the tickets before everybody else did. Apparently, somewhere between festival fields and motherhood, securing an audience with Father Christmas had become my hot ticket. I was also surprisingly invested in the task too.

Stepping into Santa’s warehouse, Cyrus froze for a moment. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, taking in the lights, decorations and toys. It was such a small reaction that I could easily have missed it. But I didn’t.

We followed the footprints from the lift through the rooms, although following anything in a straight line with a small child surrounded by Christmas toys is optimistic. A teddy would catch his eye, then a particularly sparkly decoration. Then something else. He wandered. I followed and I found myself welling up.

Hormones? Nostalgia? Exhaustion? Or simply a mum watching her little boy completely absorbed by something? I’ll never know. It was probably all of them.

Then came the Elfie Selfie. Cyrus was fascinated by the props while I tried on a wig for the camera and laughed at myself.

Before I had much time to admire the transformation, he tugged me away. There was another elf to see.

Then we stepped onto the rooftop. Christmas trees glimmered around us. There were vintage toy cars scattered among the displays and reindeer softly sang festive tunes. Beyond them, Newcastle stretched into the distance, muted by winter light. All this colour and noise and make-believe on the rooftop, with the real city carrying on below. I stood back and let Cyrus explore.

I just watched him.

Meeting Santa was, of course, the heart of the experience. Cyrus hesitated.

He wasn’t entirely sure about climbing onto Santa’s knee, which seems perfectly reasonable when you consider that we spend most of the year teaching children to be wary of strangers and then, in December, enthusiastically introduce them to a large bearded man in red. Eventually, he settled.

Of all the things I expected to find in Santa’s grotto in the middle of Newcastle, a Persian carpet wasn’t high on the list. I noticed it as we wandered through, but Cyrus said nothing. To be fair, it had stiff competition. There were elves, toys, twinkling lights and an entire Santa warehouse to investigate.

It wasn’t until we got home that I discovered he’d noticed it too. He told his dad that Santa had a Persian carpet. Of everything he’d seen that morning, he’d carried that small detail home with him. Something familiar from his Persian side of the family had appeared, quite unexpectedly, in the middle of this very British Christmas tradition.

I loved the idea of those two parts of his world meeting. Just Father Christmas, on a rooftop in Newcastle, apparently owning a Persian carpet. To Cyrus, that was worth telling Dad about.

Santa asked what he wanted for Christmas and Cyrus whispered his answer.

Not a long list, just an excavator.

The lump appeared in my throat again and a few tears escaped. It was the sudden realisation that I was standing there watching my little boy wholeheartedly believe in something I had once believed in too. Santa, to his credit, handled the emotional mother and excavator negotiations with calm.

After Santa, we moved to the elves’ kitchen for cookie decorating. Cyrus didn’t quite grasp the concept of “decorate before you eat”. Or maybe he understood perfectly and just rejected the premise.

He carefully iced one biscuit while sneaking bites from another, utterly absorbed in what he was doing. There was icing and glitter everywhere. The finished biscuit was never going to rival a Bake Off masterpiece, but he was proud of it.

Watching him concentrate made me realise how often the moments that stay with us aren’t the big ones we’ve spent weeks planning. They’re things like this. A slightly mangled biscuit and a small child delighted with what he’s made.

Fenwick had thought about the grown-ups too. There was hot chocolate and marshmallows for Cyrus, mulled wine for me and a final room of festive displays to wander through before we left. It all felt thoughtful without feeling as though we were being hurried along a Christmas production line.

Walking away, Cyrus clutching his glittered biscuit and the memory of meeting Santa, I felt strangely emotional.

Becoming a mum at 40 means I’ve experienced these childhood milestones from a different point in my own life. By then, Christmas had long since lost its mystery for me.

I knew where presents came from, and how much everything cost. I knew that “Christmas magic” usually involved an exhausted adult somewhere remembering wrapping paper, batteries and whether the school jumper needed washing.

Cyrus came along, and suddenly I was noticing the tiny things again. The way he stopped when we entered the warehouse, and the teddy that distracted him from where we were supposed to be going.

Midlife has made me more aware of those moments because I know how quickly life moves now.

For me, yes.

But not in the way I might once have imagined. I didn’t walk out of Fenwick believing in Father Christmas again.

I walked out noticing things.

A small hand clutching a glittery biscuit. Newcastle under a grey winter sky. Singing reindeer. A ridiculous wig. A little boy who had just told Santa that what he really wanted in life was an excavator.

Fenwick’s Santa on the Rooftop gave Cyrus the spectacle. What it gave me was quieter.

For a morning, I stopped being the adult responsible for booking Christmas and watched it happen instead.

And somewhere between the elves, the mulled wine and that excavator, I realised the magic hadn’t disappeared.

I’d just forgotten where to look.

Has having children changed the way you experience Christmas? And which tiny festive memory has stayed with you long after the presents themselves were forgotten?

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.