Decorating the Xmas Tree

I stuck to my plan and abandoned chocolate advent calendars in light of the fiasco with our resident thief last year.

Instead I got semi-creative and came up with notes for each day of December for the kids to open. Most of them weren’t that exciting – coming up with 24 ideas for each day hurt my brain so the kids were in for a disappointment. Still I threw a couple of chocolates in on two of the days just to keep the anticipation up.

First up on December 1 was decorating the Christmas tree. This one proved a winner. Come five-whatever-it-was a.m. the kids were jumping on me and bouncing up and down with excitement while I wished they weren’t so clever in guessing that one in advance.

“Look, we’ll do it after morning tea,” I said, shuddering at the memory of last year’s all day decorating effort.

By 7am, when many would still have their well-trained little ones sleeping, mine were already asking if it was morning tea time. Finally at 9am I caved to morning tea and the decorating.

Our tree is rather large so erecting it, in itself, takes some time. But that didn’t deter them from hopping up and down, trying to hang decorations off its still-scrunched-up-from-the-box branches with me floundering around underneath.

This is supposed to be a happy occasion, I reminded myself through gritted teeth and put on some Christmas carols. 

I gave up trying to get the tree to stand straight so, with it resembling the Leaning Tower of Pisa, I let the kids go wild. While I strung lights all around the house, they took off to deck out their rooms with random decorations and soon there was a thick layer of tinsel everywhere. 

Finally several hours later, I stepped back to admire our work. Sure enough it was done up like a dog’s dinner and with the precarious lean, all it would take was for the cat to do her usual party trick and leap into its branches for the whole thing to topple over.

Still, as predicted, I was over it so took some time out.

That night with the kids in bed I sat across the room from the higgledy-piggledy tree and had an internal dilemma. I should be one of those good parents who leaves it as the children have decorated it but the pedantic side of me wanted the decorations more strategically-placed.

In the end the anal side won out. With a burst of energy, I was off the couch and re-arranging, and I fixed the lean while I was at it. After-all, I had 24 more days of this temptation.

Now I just had to hope no one noticed in the moming. But I needn’t have worried – they were far too distracted with opening the next day’s message. However, it was a dud: “Do one nice things for your siblings.” This put them in foul moods and they were worse to each other than ever.

Bring on the chocolate day.