It’s an Easy Cheese Christmas?

Our little Advent Calendar with its 24 tiny drawers is supposed to give the kids some new and exciting Christmassy thing to do each and every day. Instead it often merely outs me as a failing mother.

The kids have a paper stuck to the fridge with the agreed upon rotating order of who gets to open the box each day. Every morning they rush downstairs with a “Can we open the box now!? Where’s Daisy? It’s her turn to open the box! Wait! Goldie isn’t down, you can’t open the box with out her!” but very often there is actually NOTHING IN THE BOX!! Nothing. “I’ll have the box ready after school,” I’ll quickly say . . . but even then . . . sometimes in a mad dash to make something, anything seem Christmassy (with five minutes remaining before they burst in the door from school), I end up putting something like this in the box:

They did make some good designs though. True there was the moment when I had to call a full halt to the proceedings to announce that, “Nobody can cry if people can’t guess what your design is . . . because sometimes it’s hard for people to tell what pictures made of . . . cheese . . . are.” But then, all went well, and my designs were particularly oohed and ahhed over for their unbelievable true-to-lifeness, and everyone had a grand time, and of course it eventually degraded to kids making dots and saying things like, “It’s a nativity scene from very far away”.

At least it isn’t as bad as the time, several years ago, when they opened a drawer to find a paper that read, “Clean the house to get it all ready for Christmas”. Abe and Daisy still haven’t let me live that one down. Apparently there is no Christmas cheer in cleaning. And, an added bonus to this one: the excitement of having the rarely seen (and slightly creepy) squeeze cheese in our house entertained Goldie for several days as she used it on all sorts of things including Honey Comb cereal. (Penny and Jesse must still retain their early survival instincts as they wouldn’t touch the stuff and, in fact, seemed slightly terrified of it).

So . . . Merry Christmas?