How much can Santa Claus drink and still function?

As it's the silly season, I thought I'd share some stories about Frank and his efforts to play Santa Claus. Ironically I wasn't there to witness either of them, although they've become Turney family lore to the extent I wish I had.

The first one was the time Mum and Dad somehow set up a ping pong table (from Santa) in the garage. I can't imagine how my parents so much as even got it out of the box without a near-fatal knifing, let alone set up and ready to use.

That one I actually do remember happening. We used to keep boxes of soft drink cans in the garage and bring them up to the kitchen fridge in handfuls to use. I can't remember if I was asleep or not, but I was disturbed by whatever almighty clatter rang out. I remember staggering through the kitchen and opening the back door to see what was going on.

It must have alerted them because Mum (probably after some hurried and choice invective about the noise Dad was making) had a ready excuse – she came out and told me to go back to bed because they were getting the cans in. Now I look back she said it with what seems an excess amount of stress-induced anger, although I was probably a bit young to pick up on it at the time.

The ping pong table was in my very early teens if I remember correctly, but in this next story I must have been about six or seven. Admittedly kids that young sleep heavier than teenagers, but anyone who remembers the house at Gabo Place knows my bedroom faced out into the back yard, where Mum and Dad's and David's bedrooms were at the front of the house.

And being Christmas it would have been hot, so surely my window would have been open. The noise must have been something to behold.

The only description I have of what was going on in the backyard was of Frank, Les Nielson and either Bob Clements or Ken Clements (maybe both, but I don't remember Uncle Bob ever going overboard with his drinking) setting up a swing set from Santa Claus while so drunk they were almost paralytic.

I can imagine my Dad's happiness with having his mate George down in Sydney. Les almost never came south of the border, and while Frank and Bob were good friends, he loved having a real drinking buddy who could put away as much as he could.

As David said at Dad's funeral, we were told we couldn't go on fishing trips up the Noosa North Shore coast because the bar was too dangerous (I had no idea what this mythical 'bar' was but I was still terrified, imagining a sea monster that swallowed boats whole), when the real reason was because they didn't want to be responsible for a clutch of ankle biters while they drank the contents of a bottle shop drive through absolutely dry.

So there would have a lot more happy camaraderie than there was around the ping pong table episode, but it would have been just as chaotic, confused and disruptive. I don't remember what time I used to go to bed on Christmas Eve as a really little kid, but do the Sheathers, Bennetts and Canavans remember what sounded like the tolling of cathedral bells from our backyard as hollow tempered steel posts and chains were assembled into the form they'd take for years to come?

Did it take them long? Could they even read instructions considering there was no light that deep into the backyard, and could they have done so even if there was in their advanced state of inebriation? Did we spend all those years on that swing set with it only inches from falling completely apart?

Most of all, why didn't I see it? And if I had, why was I too young to appreciate it? Now I'm a middle aged man myself I understand how hard it is maintaining genuine friendships with other blokes. It's no surprise about how Dad came alive when everyone was together for Christmases, New Years Eves or weddings. Drunkenly putting together a steel swing set in the backyard with Les must have been one of the happiest night of the year for him.

But I got a swing set and a ping pong table out of it, and that's not too bad as childhoods go.