When a toy Santa heralded the festive season in Athy

I WAS wandering down the town one evening last week and stopped to look at the incredible display in Bradbury’s window.

The winter wonderland created by John Bradbury has grown and expanded over the past few years and is now one of the most wonderful Christmas window displays in the country. I stood there for a good twenty minutes taking it all in.

The Big Top with jugglers, a dancing bear and the Great Wallendas trapeze artists flying high above the enthralled audience.

The hot air balloons gliding up and down and the ice skaters with their scarves and bobby hats skating away on the thin ice of a new day.

John has even managed to incorporate a number of local businesses into the scene; Manley’s, Data Print, Perry’s Supermarket, Clancy’s and the Shackleton Experience.

The snow-covered land is filled with rabbits, robins, owls and a poodle, there is even a fox slinking around. It is a credit to his imagination and creativity and well worth a visit this Christmas. As I stood there, I remembered another Christmas time and another shop window almost fifty years ago and the kindness of Mr and Mrs Duthie who made the festive season just as magical.

For generations of children in Athy, the arrival of Santa in the window of Duthie’s jewellers on Leinster Street heralded the start of the Christmas season; and as I delivered meat for the butcher next door every evening after school, I was among the first to see him.

Santa was placed on a shelf high up in the middle of the left-hand side window. He stood there nodding up and down, up and down from the beginning of December until early in the New Year. Every evening, after school, the local children would gather outside the shop and stand in awe of the red and with clockwork model, no bells, no whistles, just a man in a red suit with a bushy white beard standing in a window amid the musical instruments, clocks, watches, earrings, engagement rings and guitar strings.

Santa last stood in the window sometime in the mid-1990s and I recall going into the shop one Christmas, before the late Mrs Duthie retired, and asking her why Santa had not appeared in the window.

She told me that the clock mechanism was broken and that she would not put him in the window until such time as he was fixed. Sadly, the shop closed in 2013, and Santa never reappeared.

Through the wonder of the World Wide Web I managed to contact Mrs Duthie’s son, Alistair. Having finished his training as an engineer in Dublin, Alistair moved to the UK in the 1980’s and worked in Scotland in the oil industry, he now lives in Aberdeen.

I asked him about the Santa Claus, and he told me that the Santa Claus was a present from Father Christmas to his late father. It first landed in the shop around 1930, left by Santa Claus early in December, on one of his ‘You better watch out, you better not cry’ reconnaissance missions, and collected by Santa on his way back to the North Pole on Christmas night.

The wind-up model would appear every December and this tradition continued in the Duthie family for Alistair and his sister Heather right through their childhood. Alistair told me that, “The Santa is now with me in Aberdeen, just a short hop from the North Pole and almost as cold, where he is brought out every Christmas and put on display in our house. We have a 20-month-old granddaughter and another grandchild to be born in the next couple of weeks so hopefully they too will be the next generation to enjoy his appearance at Christmas.” The magic lives on.