Let's discuss the absolute madness of those santa baby lyrics

It was 4:13 PM on a Tuesday in mid-December. The sky over London had been a bruised, miserable purple since lunchtime, and inside the flat, the twins were orchestrating what I can only describe as a coordinated assault on our remaining dignity. Alice was attempting to eat a glass bauble she had somehow liberated from the top third of the tree, while Florence was rhythmically beating the cat's scratching post with a wooden spoon. In the background, the smart speaker was dutifully shuffling through a festive playlist I had foolishly asked it to play an hour prior to drown out the screaming.

That's the exact moment my exhausted brain actually tuned into the song playing. It was Eartha Kitt, purring her way through a list of demands that would make a cartel boss blush. I was standing there, covered in a mysterious sticky substance (probably mashed banana, but at this stage of fatherhood, you stop investigating), listening to a woman casually ask Father Christmas for a yacht.

The afternoon I actually listened to the words

There's a massive, society-wide delusion that because a song features the word 'baby' in its title, it must somehow be appropriate for children. Let me assure you, this specific tune is not about a baby in any biological or developmental sense. It's not a lullaby. It's a highly aggressive, deeply seductive financial negotiation masquerading as a jazz standard.

I found myself standing frozen in the middle of the living room (ignoring Florence who had now moved on to licking the television screen), mentally dissecting the sheer audacity of these demands. A sable under the tree? I had to look up what a sable was on my phone whilst prying Alice away from the plug sockets. It's a marten. A small woodland creature. The singer is demanding a coat made out of multiple small woodland creatures. And a '54 convertible? The logistics alone are staggering. You can't fit a '54 convertible down the chimney, and the insurance premiums on a classic car in Zone 2 London would absolutely bankrupt you.

Then we get to the yacht. I honestly lost my mind a little bit thinking about the yacht. Who asks for a boat for Christmas? Where are you keeping it? The mooring fees on the Thames are extortionate, and the river is mostly comprised of abandoned shopping trolleys and raw sewage anyway. The maintenance, the crew salaries, the barnacle scraping—it's an administrative nightmare wrapped in a bow. It’s the kind of gift that ruins a person’s life.

And decorations bought at Tiffany's? They make terrible baubles anyway, and they'd shatter the second a two-year-old even glanced in their direction.

What our GP thinks about toddler capitalism

A few days after my musical epiphany, we had to drag the girls down to the local NHS clinic for their two-year review. Our GP, Dr. Evans, is a profoundly tired man who looks like he hasn't slept a full night since the late nineties. While Alice was busy trying to pull his stethoscope apart and Florence was screaming at a poster about measles, I asked him if exposing toddlers to music about extreme luxury real estate and platinum mines was going to rot their developing brains.

He sort of sighed, rubbed his temples, and muttered something about how there isn't exactly a peer-reviewed clinical trial on the psychological effects of Eartha Kitt. But he did suggest, through the haze of a man who sees fifty screaming toddlers a day, that kids this age are essentially just terrifyingly efficient sponges for consumerism. He mumbled that while a catchy tune won't instantly turn your child into an oligarch, the general medical consensus leans heavily toward keeping hyper-commercialised media out of their ears until they're at least old enough to understand the concept of a bank overdraft. It wasn't exactly a WebMD-certified diagnosis, but I took it as a medical mandate to immediately ban the song from our house.

Things they actually need instead of a platinum mine

The irony of those infamous baby lyrics is that the singer is asking for the deed to a platinum mine, whilst my actual biological babies are currently fighting to the death over a discarded Amazon cardboard box. They don't want luxury. They want to hit things with other things.

If you're looking for something that won't ruin the global economy but will really keep your child occupied so you can drink a cup of tea before it turns to lukewarm sludge, I can't suggest the Kianao Wooden Rainbow Play Gym enough. We got one of these during the dark, early months when the girls were basically just angry potatoes who couldn't lift their own heads.

It’s brilliant precisely because it doesn't do anything overly clever. There are no flashing lights to overstimulate them, and no robotic voices singing off-key nursery rhymes that will haunt your nightmares. It's just a very sturdy, aesthetically pleasing wooden A-frame with some charming little animals hanging off it. For reasons known only to developmental psychology, Alice would lie under this thing for solid twenty-minute stretches, just batting at the wooden elephant like it owed her money. It survived two babies yanking on it daily, which in our house is the equivalent of surviving a small localized hurricane.

The great organic cotton compromise

Look, I get the appeal of wanting nice things. I don't want a sable coat, but I'd absolutely kill for a jumper that doesn't have a suspicious crusty patch on the shoulder. But with the kids, the definition of luxury changes dramatically.

Luxury isn't a diamond ring; luxury is a piece of clothing that contains a catastrophic nappy blowout without requiring you to burn the garment afterwards. During the summer, both girls went through this phase where they seemingly became allergic to their own sweat. We were dealing with these awful, angry red eczema patches in all their little elbow and knee creases. I bought a few of the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuits out of sheer desperation.

I’m usually quite cynical about anything labelled "organic" (it usually just means "twice the price and smells slightly of damp hay"), but these onesies seriously saved our sanity. They stretch enough that you can wrestle them onto a child who's performing a crocodile death roll, and because there aren't any weird synthetic chemicals in the fabric, the angry red rashes seriously cleared up after a week or two. Plus, they survive being washed at high temperatures when the inevitable biological disasters occur.

If you want to avoid turning your children into miniature materialists whilst still buying them things that genuinely work, you might want to browse Kianao's baby essentials instead of calling a luxury car dealership.

The teething trenches and the panda

There's no line in the song about wanting a cure for teething, which proves the song is a work of fiction. Because if you've an infant whose molars are erupting, you'd gladly trade a yacht, a platinum mine, and a duplex just for three hours of uninterrupted silence.

When Florence's teeth started coming through, she basically turned into a rabid badger. She chewed the edge of the coffee table. She chewed my knee. We tried frozen flannels, copious amounts of Calpol, and begging the universe for mercy. Eventually, we bought the Panda Silicone Baby Teether.

I'll be brutally honest: it's just a piece of silicone shaped like a panda. It hasn't reinvented the wheel. But the specific bumps on the back of the panda's head seemed to hit the exact spot on her gums that was causing her so much rage. She would sit in her highchair, violently gnawing on this poor panda's skull while glaring at me, but she stopped crying. It also goes straight into the dishwasher, which means I don't have to stand at the sink at midnight boiling it in a pan like some sort of exhausted medieval apothecary.

Before you face the holiday music

The trick to surviving the festive period with toddlers isn't about curating the perfect aesthetic or buying them outlandishly expensive gifts that they'll just ignore in favour of the wrapping paper. You basically just have to chuck the iPad behind the sofa while desperately shoving a wooden block into their hands and hoping they don't notice the deception while you frantically try to remember where you hid the emergency chocolate.

We've instituted a strict ban on jazz singers demanding luxury vehicles in our house, opting instead for background noise that doesn't make me feel financially inadequate. If you want to make actual sensible choices for the tiny, irrational dictators in your own home, go and explore Kianao's full collection of sustainable gear before you completely lose your mind.

The completely chaotic FAQ section

Should I really ban this song from my playlist?

I mean, you don't have to call the music police, but if you're already on edge from stepping on a rogue piece of Lego at 6 AM, listening to someone complain that their stocking doesn't have the deed to a mine in it's probably going to push you over the edge. I just skip it. My blood pressure can't take the entitlement. The twins prefer songs that involve farm animals making aggressive noises anyway.

What's honestly wrong with buying them loads of plastic toys?

Aside from the fact that your living room will eventually look like a landfill site exploded in a primary school, the plastic stuff just breaks. We were gifted a plastic singing dog that lasted exactly four days before Alice threw it down the stairs and the voice box got stuck on a demonic, skipping loop. Wooden things don't scream at you when the batteries die, mostly because they don't take batteries, which is exactly how I like my parenting gear.

How do you explain materialism to a two-year-old?

You absolutely don't. I tried to explain to Florence that she didn't need a third rice cake because we had to share our resources, and she responded by throwing her sippy cup at my groin. You can't reason with them. You just have to quietly control their environment by not bringing the flashy, awful things into the house in the first place, and distracting them with an empty Tupperware container when they demand something shiny.

Is listening to pop music going to ruin my child?

Our GP seemed to think they'd survive, but I'm pretty sure my kids have already sustained permanent psychological damage from the amount of times we've had to listen to the soundtrack of 'Frozen' in the car. Just try to mix in some songs that aren't about extreme wealth accumulation. We listen to a lot of 90s Britpop now, which I'm sure comes with its own set of questionable themes, but at least nobody is asking for a sable.