Almost before Halloween was over, the Christmas goodies started appearing on the shelves and the flood of Christmas adverts started as soon as we turned over the page on the calendar from October to November.
Even the Christmas Costa cups are out and as cute as they are, I’d much rather they weren’t brought out until the start of December.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about being prepared for Christmas and my own preparations start long before November the 1st but that’s not the point. We don’t start any Christmas celebrations or do any Christmas family activities until the 1st December and I think seeing Christmas everywhere genuinely takes a little of the magic away as well as giving the kids longer to add things to their ever growing Christmas wish list.
I worry that children are beginning to expect too much of Christmas, my two included because the toy adverts are currently trying to convince them that they need all sorts of goodies which I know from experience will be played with once or twice and then stuck under the bed where they won’t see the light of day again for months.
We always a little time at Christmas finding ways to show gratitude for the lives we have and the things we have in it but I’m very conscious that we could be doing more. I know lots of people do this for various reasons but the reason I want to make sure that my children know just how lucky they are.
I’ve clearly done OK with Master Frugal whose Christmas wish list consists of around four presents with a note on the bottom to say that the rest can go to ‘the kids who don’t have stuff’. He’s such a thoughtful little boy who thinks more of others than himself and really does take great pleasure from buying gifts for the children in our area who don’t have as much as we do and it always makes me proud to see him putting the gifts he’s bought in the donation box in our local supermarket.
Miss Frugal is a whole other story though with a Christmas list the size of my arm! She likes to buy presents to donate as much as her brother does but she likes to do that in addition to the presents she gets and wouldn’t think to offer to give up some of her presents as well.
I want to make Christmas this year more of a family Christmas than we’ve had in the last few years with more focus on family fun experiences and making sure we have more of an attitude of gratitude for what we do receive.
We’re going to have an amazing family Christmas but it’s not going to start until the 1st December, no matter how much the TV and internet tries to tell us otherwise and it’s not going to involve lots of ‘stuff’ that we don’t need and only want because marketing executive tells us that we want it.
Sorry for the bah humbug rant!
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