In the lead up to Christmas this year, I have been a little subdued about Santa Claus. Woo is five, but he has always been on the fence about Santa. He is certain that the whole magically delivery of presents is impossible, and constantly questions me on the mechanics of how it could work, how Santa fits in the chimney, what happens if there is no chimney, how could he could possibly hand deliver all the parcels to all the houses in just one night… I have been on the fence about lying to the lils about Santa, so I try to keep the story alive while lying as little as possible.

One of the things that I had avoided all together was the NORAD site, which allows you to track Santa’s progress around the world. I thought that it would show Woo just how hard it would be for Santa to cover the distances and go in each house. Then Willy showed him and the opposite happened. He bought in, and the excitement level grew and grew with each update and video he saw. Woo didn’t look for what was feasible; he just enjoyed the magic that they showed and let his anticipation grow. I’m so glad that Willy showed him, as it pushed my little boy firmly into the believer camp for at least one more year.

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Christmas morning was really quite civilized in our house. We had asked Woo to stay upstairs until 7:00am, and he did (to the best of our knowledge)! He snuck into our bed a little after six, let me know that he had peeked from the top of the stairs to see gifts under the tree and then we both fell back to sleep for another thirty minutes. I am not sure how many more years this will happen, but I was happy to have that extra time!

The routine in our house is that we get to open stockings immediately, but wait til after breakfast for the gifts. The lils then take their time and savour the stockings, and we I get a minute to have a coffee before the chaos. Despite the fact that there is no NHL this year, hockey is still a big deal in our house, so their stockings contained a number of packages of hockey trading cards, including an Ottawa Senators pack.

Woo carefully examined his cards, then asked to see Goose’s. When he realized that they were the same, he turned to his sister and happily let her know that “both sets had a Jason Spezza card (her favourite player), so he would not need to give her his Spezza card”. It was so sweet the way he just decided that she would get it, no strings attached!

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Poor Goose got the plague last week. It started with a high fever on Wednesday night, and was joined by a nasty cough and general pathetic-ness on Thursday. I knew that this was a bad one when she voluntarily had a nap at 9:00 am. Three days in a row. She didn’t cry when she found out that she was missing pyjama day at school, never once asked to go outside, basically stopped eating (and lost 2.5kg!!), went through nine boxes of kleenex, and never once fought with her brother; it was serious. I kept thinking that it had to get better, but it wasn’t, so we ended up in a clinic on Christmas Eve. Thankfully it was ruled to be just a bad cold. A really, really bad cold.

We are Christmas Eve wrappers. Last minute all the way in this house! I’ve heard the stories from my mom of all the nights that she and my dad sat up until the wee hours of the night, carefully wrapping gifts, even using the special Santa paper and Santa pen, and how tired she was when the three of us woke them just hours later… I do it at the last minute anyways, but use cloth bags, so it goes MUCH faster. As we sat on the floor in the family room, I listened to poor Goose coughing. That night the cough seemed worse than ever, and she didn’t really settle in to a restful sleep over course of the evening. By the time I went to bed, all I wanted for Christmas was for her to wake feeling better.

She woke still coughing like mad, and it took a good while before she could even sit and open her presents. The coughing got slightly better, but was still bad a lunch time. Then somehow, by dinner time, it stopped. She got that spark back in her eye, was fooling around with her brother and went to bed without coughing once. I felt a weight lift off my chest. My lil girl was on the mend, I’d gotten my Christmas wish.

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Now that we are somewhat settled back home, one of the things that I hope to do more often is contribute to Kids in the Capital, an awesome website for Ottawa families.  The post that I have up there today is on Giving Back at the Holidays. It’s an update of a post that I wrote two years ago, inspired then by some discussions about how to involve really small children in some charitable giving around the holidays.   When I got involved in some similar conversations last month, I figured that it was time for an update.  It was also time for me to look for inspiration for our own family.

This is the third year that our family is following Missfish’s twist on an advent calendar, where we do twenty-five days of Christmas-y activities in the month of December.  We have planned for at least one third of the activities to involve a charitable giving component. This year, the lils have asked many more questions than the last two years, and have really started to think about what the giving means.  Like when we were sorting through old snowsuits for The Snowsuit Fund last night, and Woo came across a toque that just fit his head.  He insisted on keeping it, so I asked how many toques he had and he answered that he had about eighteen (the real total is three). So I asked him how many he could wear at once, and if he thought that a boy or girl who didn’t have a hat would like a warm head on cold days.  He thought for a minute, brought it back to the pile and helped me count up the toques to see how many little people could now have warm heads.  He got it.

Many of the activities that we are doing as a family are listed in the post on Kids in the Capital.  Please check it out if you are looking for ideas for your own family.

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