B and I have always loved Christmas! B actually finds searching for and buying presents for people quite exciting and nowadays she can simply do it all online so doesn’t have to worry about anxiety regarding going shopping. So, we’re always keen to put up our decorations as early as possible. However, because we like to decorate together we tend to wait for a weekend so that I’m not at work. As it happens, the 1st of December this year was a Saturday so we were able to start putting our decorations up really early!
Our first task was to tidy what was laughingly still being referred to as the kitchen! I have seen tidier skips than the state the dining half of our kitchen-diner was in. We’d literally just been flinging boxes from deliveries in there for weeks and the floor was covered in tipped up boxes of X’s craft materials and toys. It was on the list of “This should be done”, but sadly was lower down the list than lots of other things at the time.
My parents had said they’d have X for a couple of hours, so we leapt on this and decided to go full ninja parents and remove some of X’s old toys and take them to the charity shop. This can only really be done when I am about, and more importantly it’s much easier when he isn’t! We managed a trike, a garage with slide/cars/people etc, a megablocks truck and another large ride on truck. This cleared a space in the shed, so that we could move X’s bike, so that it could come out of the kitchen exactly where the Christmas tree was going to go… it’s often like some odd game of drafts or the Towers of Hanoi in our house!
We never quite managed the wooden play kitchen as we couldn’t find the two hooks that had fallen off! I’m sure I put them “Somewhere safe so that I can easily find them and put them back on”…. We gave everything a good clean, and loaded it all into the back of the car. We also flat packed a load of the cardboard boxes so we could drop them at the recycle centre on the way past, because I can’t waste a trip if we can do umpteen things at once!
We now only had 30 minutes until X was going to come home. As we drove through the square past the charity shops we looked for parking… nothing… as expected. “Right, we’ll go to the tip with the cardboard, then look again on the way back past”. [Yes, Yes, it’s a Recycling Centre now.. but I’ll always call it the tip!] After the tip there is still nowhere to park. So, we abandon, cover everything with a sheet so that X doesn’t see them on Monday before school and shoot to Tesco as we realise we have nothing for lunch.
X gets back from Nanny and Granddad’s and based on the conversation we had with him in the morning all we get is a “Tree up yet?”. The next hour and half is spent with us trying to sort though mountains of crayons, little wooden buildings, scraps of cut up paper, feathers, stones, coins, paints, pompoms, conkers and all the other wonder things found in the treasure troves that are piles of kids crap! And for the whole hour and a half X would ask us every few seconds whether we were finished yet! “Why didn’t you get him to sort it all out?” I hear some of you asking, because we wanted it done this side of Christmas to be completely honest!
During our digging we got out the advent calendars, he remembers these from last year (As does the dog) so they both know what to expect. We relent to his requests and all get our first chocolates out. However, for some reason X has now got it into his head that the name for these things is “Candy Floss”. I have no idea whatsoever where this has come from, but it did get me confused the following day when he was pointing at advent calendars in the shop saying “Candy Floss!”.
Eventually, the kitchen was ready to take a tree in it’s usual spot and some general decorations. The tree goes up, and alongside we have our annual conversation about whether the tree is going to be too tatty this year, and if we should buy a new one, and the fact that when we do, it’ll have built in lights, because trying to sort the lights out and make them look spread out is a right pain in the arse! It would seem the tree has survived another year as no more branches snapped off so “Its fine”.
X helped us putting the tree decorations on and other than us telling him to spread them out a bit he was genuinely helpful… even if a little overexcited bordering on hyperactive! X has also now got a small tree in his room as we had a 1ft tree which I’d used at uni he’d found in the box, so he was also up and down stairs adding things to that and looking really pleased with himself. I don’t mind him being over enthusiastic to be honest, it is Christmas and I want him to be excited about it. I can’t really judge either as my Mum and Dad had to ban me from even mentioning Christmas until after my sisters birthday just before Halloween!
At that point we were starting to flag bit and figured our mission of “Put the tree up” was complete. So we abandoned all the other decorations until the following day with a healthy attitude of “We’ll have another fun day tomorrow decorating little man!” which actually means “We’re already knackered and cant do any more, so lets stop and also make sure we’ve got something to distract you tomorrow to make our lives a bit easier if we’re still knackered then too!”
