Journal Your Christmas: 5th December

Here's one for you. On any given day, don't tell your four year old that you'll take him to see Santa unless you know FOR A FACT Santa is actually going to be there and available to receive visitors. Apparently four year olds don't like to be misled about this. They take it very seriously. I speak from bitter experience.

Today's entry should have been a warm and fuzzy reflection on our trip to see Father Christmas at the local garden centre yesterday. However after promising my son we'd go, I found that Father Christmas doesn't work Fridays, either there or anywhere in the local area. My son flew into the sort of rage that, ironically, should ensure that Santa leaves him the bare minimum of presents this year, if the old Naughty/Nice equation holds true.

So I ended up staying on-prompt and focussing on the countdown to Christmas, specifically our advent calendar.

Personally, I love the sort of paper advent calendars we had when I was little, where you open up a door to find just a picture behind them, but I don't think that sort of thing washes with the current generation though, in fact I'm not sure you can even get them anymore can you? Failing that, given the choice I would plump for a bog standard chocolate advent calendar, but one of my kids is allergic to milk so he can't have chocolate. So we have one of the wooden ones that you fill with sweets yourself. Looks quite nice, but causes all sorts of problems. We daren't fill it in advance because the thieving little buggers would nick the whole month's worth of sweets if they could, and then go on a sugar-induced rampage. So we fill it each night before we go to bed, with a modest jelly sweet each. Or at least we're supposed to. Well, we tend to manage it for the first three or so days of Advent. Then we start forgetting, which usually results in 3am trips downstairs to fill it.

And the kids, mindful of the fact that they'll get sweets before breakfast, have started waking up earlier and earlier. My four year old is hopping out of bed before 6am these days, anxious for his sugar fix. Nightmare.