I think we have all been there at some point with our children. The children are in bed, it has been a good day and so you are casually flicking through Pinterest looking for ideas and inspiration of things you can do with your children for Christmas. Christmas seems to bring out our crafty sides, our desire to cook and eat more and we all want that perfect present too, but it doesn’t always go according to plan.
Every year my children bake gifts for their teachers. I find it really hard to buy teachers gifts, I don’t know them personally and I don’t like to buy them the same thing or something which has had little thought process to it. Instead, I set the girls to work on baking something for them. It doesn’t matter what, this is entirely up to the girls. One year they had found these cookies with clear glass in the middle, well it looked like clear glass. The recipe seemed straightforward enough they have made cookies lots of times before, and the stained glass pattern was simply a hard-boiled sweet in the middle which would melt in the oven to form the look the girls liked.
What could possibly go wrong?
I can tell you. The sweets melted but they melted so much that what we ended up with was a large sheet of ‘glass’ [melted sweets] with random cookie stuck in it. It looked nothing like the neat cookies in the picture and the girls were very disappointed. Needless to say, we had to make something else completely that year.
One year I was so incredibly busy with work, this was before my current job in photography, that I completely forgot what the date was. My children have an advent calendar which I fill up each year, it saves on plastic and I can place items in that I know they will like, but I had completely forgotten all about it and had not bought anything. They were not impressed that morning when they woke up and there was nothing in the advent calendar. I had to rush to the shop whilst they were at nursery and magically when they came home all was back to how it should be.
There have been Christmas fails with food too. From burning items of Christmas dinner to the year my Mum decided to make a sugar free dessert. A great idea to cut back on the sugar but we all took one bite and promptly declared we were full. My Mum opened another box of chocolates and that put an end to the sugar-free dessert.
No matter what we do though as parents we always seem to have the same Christmas fail every year and that is the present. Let’s be honest my children change their minds on what they do and do not like so often that I don’t think even they know anymore. It comes as no surprise then that the must-have toy last week is now the no longer desire it toy of this week. This makes Christmas really tricky. Buy too far in advance and it won’t be the right thing but wait too long and it will sell out, it always does!
Whatever happens though, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a Christmas fail!