She’s making a list, checking it twice...
Clean the house to show-home standards, food shopping for now, food shopping for Christmas, decorating, visiting, meal planning, present buying, present hiding, present wrapping, arranging to spend quality “catch up” time with every single person you know, work night out, gym night out, school play, teacher presents, negotiations with relatives, childcare over the holidays.
Surely Santa is real by now? We must have manifested him! If we haven’t all collectively thought Santa to life after hundreds of years of magical thinking, does that mean we didn’t all heal David Beckham's foot by touching our TV screens and focusing hard together in 2002?!
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The idea of bringing some green into your home, adding lights everywhere, gathering family together, preparing a special meal and treating loved ones to a gift in the depths of winter, is fabulous. But, as I’m watching the smart meter clock up £15 gas a day, in this cold snap, I can’t help but be grateful that my son cut the head off his Elf On The Shelf with scissors, years ago. The reason? “I just don’t trust him”.
Elf On The Shelf is intended to help your children behave. But it’s minus 3 outside, everyone’s floored by the latest super-flu and the pavements are thick with deadly ice. The notion that someone or something is in your house, spying at you through glass eyes and reporting your behaviour back to Santa, could be playing on little minds. This is in addition to the amount it’s already playing on the parents' minds.
I do not miss jolting up in bed, just as I was falling asleep with the horror of just remembering to “do the elf”. Throw back the covers in rage and walk to a freezing kitchen to throw cereal everywhere. Just so I could clean it up again in the morning. Even if you don’t have an elf, “Santa’s watching” is a terrifying notion.
Christmas is magical. But that magic is the result of hard and selfless work, put in by loving parents. And it’s difficult to maintain, given we’ve never all agreed on set rules of what to say about Santa. He looks different in every film and every single shop.
One year, after we had just been for a magical Santa visit in Chavasse Park. I was driving along the Strand and saw two Santas waiting to cross the road. I tried to bat it off with the old “they’re just Santa’s helpers”, but I knew then the game was up. The industry itself makes it too hard to believe!
Furthermore, I put it to you that no one (who isn’t a professional chef) has ever cooked a meal for more than six people, after three glasses of wine, and enjoyed it. And that my friends, is the problem with Christmas.
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