‘Is that it then?’ ask nation’s spoiled children

As adults return to work following the festive period, children across the nation have today asked if a year of good behaviour was really worth a couple of days playing with toys they’re already bored with.

After a year of financial difficulty for many families, budgets have been stretched to give frankly ungrateful children a series of over-priced plastic novelty items that have already been discarded forever.

Seven-year-old Tarquin Copson-James told us, “Santa has let me down, frankly. I don’t buy all this recession rubbish.

“All year long my parents have told me that Santa was watching me to make sure I was well-behaved, and I so was.

“Yet all I got was a PS5, an electric scooter, a football goal, some transformers, a spiderman, remote control car and about a dozen other things I haven’t even opened yet, but they’ll be rubbish, I just know it.

“I have to tell you, a year spent fighting my natural urge to behave like an out-of-control psychopathic shit really doesn’t seem worth it.”

Parents groups have defended the commercialisation of the holiday, claiming the threat of Santa seeing them is the only thing stopping their broods turning every home into a modern reenactment of Lord of the Flies.

Concerned parent Sharon Foster said, “For the last few years my standard disciplinary technique has been to simply shout ‘Santa is taking notes you know’.

“But if the kids don’t appreciate the tat I buy them after the threats, where is my leverage? No, you don’t understand; my kids are evil, I am genuinely frightened where this will all end.”

One parent told us, “Next year I’m going to hire a hypnotist to make my kids think they’ve had all these great presents, and that they are already bored of them – it will be much, much cheaper.”