the adlards

Boxing Day’s my favourite day of the year. Let’s be honest, the preceding couple of days are really something of a trial, despite the entire marketing machine of the Western World straining every fibre of its being to persuade us otherwise.

I finally, on Saturday afternoon, joined the ranks of those grim-faced but victorious Christmas dads – the ones with a look in their eye hovering between “I’ve done it all” and “I hope I haven’t done it again”, the ones carrying great fistfuls of bulging packages of every shade of brown paper. Christmas packages don’t come in plastic bags, apparently, and must be boxed/wrapped/stuffed regardless of size such that the paper bag is filled to it’s maximum extent. On de-bagging, my armloads of soon-to-be-most-treasured-possessions fitted very easily into my handluggage, which I thought as decent a hiding place as any. I always finish my Christmas shopping on Christmas eve, I think I need the pressure.

That said, the highlight of Christmas Eve was without doubt turning around in Starbucks to find Josie skating about the floor standing on two bags of their Special Christmas Blend coffee beans. Sometimes it’s just impossible to strike an appropriately corrective tone. She had a great arm-action going.

Christmas Day is wonderful and with kids is a whole other experience, but then comes Boxing Day. The cooking’s done and – in a perfect world – properly digested. The washing-up’s done. The Three are placidly playing with their now-most-treasured-possessions and I can do whatever I feel like … get a bit of exercise pushing a laden stroller to the park, clean the house as I look forward to the New Year, watch the truly startling selection of kids features on tele. Sometimes one’s day-to-day experience leads one, unwitting, to such sudden and remarkable heights that all the world seems laid out peacefully below and it’s not clear that there’s anything useful left to be done. Or so I’m told. Haven’t actually been there myself.

But Bank Holiday Tuesday! The Day in Lieu … who knows what promise it holds?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 at 10:29 pm by james and is filed under Family, Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.