A Large Family Christmas – (how to hold your sh*t together when all around are losing theirs!)

The Christmas image of a child or two sitting opening gifts, gently tearing at the wrapping then popping the paper to one side only to run over and hug their parents, kisses and gushes of thank you follow by ‘ooh show me what you got’….

Yeah right!

Picture the scene!

6 children all ploughing their way through a department store worth stack of gifts in a rush to get to their own pile.  Wrapping paper flying through the air and screams of ‘OH MY GOD, ITS WHAT I ALWAYS WANTED’ ringing in your ears.  A glass of Baileys for breakfast is of course acceptable when you know whats in store for the rest of the day, load up now lovely as its only going to get more manic (and seriously…don’t even start to mentally total up how much you have spent!)

Carpet?!  What carpet?  Forget it!

For the whole of Christmas day you wont even know you have a floor!  Toys, random bits of paper and chocolate will litter every inch and you just know there isn’t a single toy that isn’t out of its box and scattered for all to see – did you even get it for Christmas if its not unwrapped and played with straight away?!   Something will always break on the first try which will result in simultaneous tears and cries of silent rants of ‘we spend how much on that plastic tat’!

Take in a deep breath and try to round the kids up to taking all of their new goodies upstairs to their rooms (just so you can all sit down again!) Realise that you forgot to get the prawns out of the freezer and run to put them on a plate and see if they can defrost in an hour!  Gather up some presents and take 500 trips up and down the stairs making sure you put the right presents in the right bedrooms before WWIII breaks out!

Dinner Time kids!

Now the fun begins, not only have you spent the last week preparing vegetables and a 5 stone turkey but you handmade gravy (WTF!) and even doused the potatoes in goose fat with one of those artificial inseminator thingies only for the kids to turn round and say they aren’t hungry!  ‘Scuse me??  You will sit down and eat all 3 courses of this meal i lovingly prepared (wipes gravy granules from cheek – busted!!)

Pass me a Snowball!

What do you mean the Queen does a speech on Christmas Day – I thought everyone took a nap for 2-4??

Oh damn it you’re still in your pjs and no one has taken a single photo yet?  Is it worth wrapping everything back up just for some pictures and is there  any turkey left to set the dinner scene – damn it wheres the crackers?  ‘YOU FORGOT TO PUT THE CRACKERS OUT, I ASKED YOU TO DO ONE THING’

The kids are starting to flag by 6pm which is when you break out the pickled onions, cheese and fruit cake.  Time to crack open the bottle of Tia Maria you were saving especially for this point ‘WHO DRANK ALL THE DAMN COKE!?’

FFS – I’m glad its only one day a year!

And I wouldn’t change a thing 🙂

Merry Christmas

Debbie