The Night Before Mother's Day - a horror story

The Night Before Christmas is a ghastly poem, and probably one of the best known in the world. It's been parodied time and again. Determined to boldly go where no man had gone before, I decided to do yet another parody, but this time featuring Mothers' Day.

I recalled my own childhood where once a year we would go to Dad and ask him for money to buy Mum a Mother's Day present. (After all, we weren't going to use our own pocket money. That was for buying important things like lollies and albums and Miller shirts with bits of gold lurex thread woven into them. How on earth did we boys not realise these shirts were gay? They even had fake pearl press-stud buttons.The Miller shirt was a cowboy shirt designed by Liberace.) And Dad would give us fifty cents each for presents. I know it doesn't sound like much, but in the sixties we used to have this remarkable institution called The Mother's Day Stall. They would erect trestle tables in the quadrangle at school and festoon them with toiletries and homewares and other gift items donated by the poor bloody mums whose wonderfulness we were purportedly celebrating. A portion of the sale money went to the school - but it was an economically flawed concept. You see, everything on the stall cost between five and fifty cents. Not much money to be made there, and the accounting fees would have eaten it away. And even though Mum told us every year that it would be lovely to receive 'just one' nice present from the stall rather than many little ones - we knew better. We were kids and we knew how wonderful showbags were. To us, the stall was nothing but an opportunity to make our very own showbags. We'd go there armed with our fifty cent pieces, and seek out every single five cent item - the lavender bags and the bath crystals and the aprons that some poor mum had made and donated (or bought from a Chinese sweatshop if she had any sense). Every now and then we'd splash out on a ten cent item, if it was particularly desirable. I remember there would always by these white dishwasher brushes wearing black cardboard sunglasses so that they looked like Cousin It from The Addams Family.

Somehow, these were the must-have items on the stall and there was always a race for them. After we kids had filled our Mother's Day showbags, we compared our purchases with those of the other kids. A lot of swapping went on. I remember scented candles weren't terribly highly valued and you were laughing if you could offload those to some sucker in exchange for, say, a teatowel rolled up into a cylinder and tied at each end with a piece of gold ribbon so that it looked like a Christmas bon-bon. These items were highly prized because there was always a little toy wrapped up in the bon-bon, just like the trinket in a Kinder Surprise. And of course, even though it was a Mother's Day gift and technically not for us, we knew that we'd be the ones to keep the toy. This was only fair. After all, Mum had the beautiful teatowel all for herself. I remember clearly every Mother's Day morning, my sisters and I would run into our parents' room and empty our magical showbags on the bedspread. Mum would go through the booty, making admiring noises about the little bottles of Epsom salts we had given her, or the handkerchiefs that were monogrammed with initials that weren't hers. We thought we were the three wise men and Mum was Jesus. But rather than gold, frankincense and myrrh we were giving Mum dozens of far more valuable items, such as home-made soaps and Jex steel wool pads ingeniously stitched together to look like jobby-monsters, though I think they were meant to be teddy bears . On top of displaying such largesse, we were also expected to make breakfast for Mum, which seemed grossly unfair to us, after we had given her the wonderful showbags, full of many items that she had possibly even made and donated to the stall herself. I think this is why the breakfast was always terrible. We resented having to make French toast when we had already done what was required of us, viz: we had covered Mum's bedspread in abominable crap. I may be imagining it, but Mum's face always bore an odd expression that seemed slightly fearful. Judy Horacek has captured that look very well on the cover, making the book seem like a horror story, which of course it is.

In the likelihood that The Night Before Mother's Day would never be published I stuck the text on my blog with some delightful Victorian illustrations that I downloaded from Project Gutenberg (from a volume of Punch magazines). It looked exactly like this:

Then something rather strange happened. Up until the time that I posted the verse, my blog received roughly, approximately, in the region of zero visits per day. But the Mother's Day post seemed to go viral. Just check the statistics:

Astute observers will notice the 'spike', representing an increase in the number of visitors to my blog when the Mother's day verse appeared. They may also notice a slight drop-off on either side.

Erica Wagner of Allen and Unwin (with whom most of us are hopelessly in love) rang and told me that she would like to make a little book out of it and that she wanted to ask Judy Horacek to illustate. I of course said that this was a superb choice of illustrator, while I frantically googled 'Horacek' and realised that I did in fact know Judy's work well and had even laughed at it many times. Judy is that rare beast: a really strong illustrator who can do excellent jokes. Is the word I'm looking for cartoonist? Is Michael Leunig a mere cartoonist? I think not. (Don't you absolutely hate it when people use that expression? It's like they're being cross as well as pompous for no real reason.)

I didn't think we'd have a lavendar bag's chance in hell of getting someone as good as Judy, who could write her own jokes, thank you very much, to decorate my own wry jokes about Mother's Day. But she said yes! And she did a wonderful job.

The end result is smashing. Even the Americans liked it and took loads of copies, though of course they had to correct our misspelling of 'Mom'. I shouldn't say 'even the Americans' because they have been very nice to me and taken a few of my books. The English, on the other hand, are rather annoyed by my work - 'Fellow seems to be trying too hard' is the usual response. 'Fellow seems to be an Australian' is another. 'I think not,' is yet another. But they like it in America when you try hard! Good for them.

Might I also add to any thrifty younger people who may be reading, that the book is also roughly the price of a greetings card. And your mum will enjoy it more. So buy this book instead of a card. It'll be on the counter of bookstores everywhere, making Penguin and Scholastic very cross. Don't bother looking for the original blog post. I deleted it. I'm already giving away a whole e-book on this website. That's enough largesse!