A couple of weeks ago I went into the local Woolworths and was horrified to realise they were playing Christmas music in the store. I mean, I’ve worked in retail, I’ve been on week two of a two week plan by the beginning of October, I’ve been worrying about Christmas temps in August and I’ve been panicking about the January Sale by October but those days are behind me now. Sometime this year I realised that Davies had already gotten doubtful about the whole Santa idea and frankly if Tarly ever believed in the first place I’d be surprised 😉 my orgy of spending excused with festive reasons is no longer available to me and Ady and I have been spending hours fantasising over running off somewhere remote to spend Christmas either just the four of us or with friends rather than family and trying to ‘recapture the magic’ a bit. If Christmas doesn’t have religious implications for you then possibly you shouldn’t celebrate it at all but for me certainly it is a time of traditions, warm fuzziness and lots and lots of tinsel.
So today we went to see Polar Express, a rather charming film about the doubters in Father Christmas being picked up on Christmas Eve by the Polar Express train to the North Pole where they meet F.C. and one of them gets picked to recieve the first present of Christmas as the clock strikes midnight. And of course there is the whole ‘personal journey while on the physical journey’ type stuff along the way. Hugely predictable of course but I could probably count on one hand the amount of films I’ve seen in my whole life which weren’t. Plenty of action and humour and touching bits and although it was pretty long it kept a good pace and had Tarly easily the most captivated she has been all week. And as I happen to really rather like Tom Hanks the fact he was to Polar Express what Magnus Scheving is to Lazy Town (and Dennis Waterman was to Minder 🙂 ) that was all good too.
So we left the cinema feeling really rather festive and this afternoon we’ve been to the Wizard store where I spent just over a tenner and got loads of bits and pieces for Christmas pressies including things like diaries, pens, craft kits etc and I’ve spent ages on ebay this afternoon bidding on stuff for Christmas presents too. Retail therapy on an electronic and far smaller level, with no added annoying shoppers or shop assistants. 🙂
The children have played with geomags and plastic animals again for ages, leading me to wonder yet again why we have quite such a massive amount of toys in the playroom when they almost always choose these ones – I have a bit of a sort out in there planned for the morning followed by playdoh in the afternoon featuring Lucy, Rebecca and Richard. Tonight my parents are coming over for dinner, hence the early blog.