Our Halloween

On the basis of better late than never, this is how our Halloween unfolded this year.  It was a super-busy, hectic, exhausting day and I still have not caught up with myself but at least all the stuff keeping me on my feet (literally) was fun stuff.  I spent the morning working at the preschool dressed up as the Cat in the Hat which included a parade and a party.  Then I dashed to my kids’ Elementary School for the first of their three Halloween parties, watched the school’s Halloween parade, and ran between two classrooms for the other two class parties.  Then it was home to prepare for the evening – finishing touches to the house decorations, including setting up our giant jumping spider, and getting dinner cooking for the guests we had coming over.  My reward was that after all of that hubbub of activity all day, my friend and I got to sit on the porch handing out treats while quaffing some deliciously cockle-warming Autumn apple cider sangria.  It was a wonderful, fun-filled day of festivities and friendship.

Costumes!  Halloween for my kids is more about the dressing up than it is about candy.  My oldest son was undecided as to whether to go trick or treating or not.  Ultimately he decided to accompany his brothers around the streets while wearing a super-creepy-gross mask but without earning any candy.  That was his compromise with himself.  My youngest dressed up as the Grim Reaper.  He changed his mind dozens of times about what he was going to dress up as and then ended up picking something quick and easy from a store shelf.  My 11 year old cobbled together his character and costume from various bits and pieces we already owned.  As soon as he saw the metallic red mask in a store, he knew he wanted to build a creepy character around it.  He spent all day being asked what he was dressed up as  but he didn’t care.  He just wanted to do his own thing.

My 9 year old, meanwhile, had had his costume designed and planned for months.  He is into Steampunk so was determined to have a costume that worked with that aesthetic.  We spent a lot of time scouring thrift stores and crafting accessories, adapting shop bought items to make them work.  Probably a more crafty and capable parent would have been able to construct the whole costume in a matter of a couple of afternoons or evenings but, with my sewing skills and my lack of experience with jewellery making, it took me ages.  It was a labour of love for sure and I am adamant that he will be wearing this costume until I see fit.

Christmas Day 2015

Incredibly, this is our third Christmas in America.  However, this year was our first Christmas in our new home since the first year we were in rental accommodation and last year we were vacationing in Florida.  It has been fun properly decorating this house for the festive season for the first time, determining the logistics of where gifts should be left, where they should be opened, and cooking Christmas dinner in our kitchen for the first time.  It is almost as if spending Christmas in our new home has cemented its status as “home”.  When we left our home in Scotland, it was emotional because of all the memories and traditions connected to that house.  Now we are making new memories and connecting the house to new traditions.  Since it was just the six of us and no travel was involved, we also had the pleasure of a very relaxed and chilled Christmas Day.  My bonus gift was that my husband took charge of Christmas dinner so I had a day off from cooking.  He’s a pretty good cook so that was delicious treat as well as giving me time to just sit on the sofa and flick through some new books.  Bliss.

Holiday Traditions

One week into December and our holiday traditions are underway.  Despite not being Christians, we celebrate a secular version of Christmas as both Mr Pict and I were brought up with Christmas and wanted to keep those traditions going when we had kids of our own.  Of course, some of the traditions we had back in Britain have had to be mothballed since we emigrated to America.  Pantomimes, for instance, do happen here but are far too expensive for us to attend so no more pantomimes for us for the time being.  We have, however, started new traditions since moving here.  It seems those are already ingrained since the kids were determined that we were going to do the exact same things this year that we have done before.

First among these was the Holiday Light Show at Shady Brook Farm.  We first went in 2013 for our first American Christmas and then again last year.  I offered a suggestion that we do something different this year, another light show even, but the kids shot my suggestions down.  They want repetition and tradition.  So off to Shady Brook Farm we went.  I think the kids like that we drive through all the illuminations, cosy in the car, not having to wander around in the chill night.  They had fun seeing old favourites among the lights and spotting some new additions.  Then we parked up and got out to see the tree and buy some kettle corn and visit the farm shop.  The place was jam packed with people, however, so we didn’t stay too long.

December also means the return of advent traditions to help the kids count down to Christmas Day.  We have a small wooden chest full of drawers that gets open every day plus a Playmobil advent calendar, both traditions we have had since the kids were tiny wee, but now we also have Noel, our Elf on the Shelf.  Now there is a tradition I regret starting.  We don’t do the whole “magical” bit.  The kids know fine well it is me who moves the Elf each night and they know that the Elf is not reporting back to Santa.  For them, finding Noel each morning is just a fun wee treasure hunt.  They look forward to seeing what Elf s up to, either some kind of antics or else a message for them regarding a festive activity.  All harmless fun except that I have to remember to move the ruddy Elf every evening.  Already, a mere week in, I have had to get back out of bed in order to go and move him somewhere, having been jolted out of the land of Nod by the sudden remembrance that Noel is exactly where he was the 24 hours before.  I am also struggling to be very creative with him.  Some people do these amazingly elaborate set ups with their Elves.  Not me.  I just hide Noel somewhere.  If I do a set up, it’s usually something that makes the kids chuckle rather than create magic.  Noel pooped chocolate into a jar the other day.  On the first day, he was found under the Christmas tree with a bottle of liqueur.  That was just as well since I failed to move him that night and I had the excuse of an Elf hangover for why he hadn’t moved.

One day, Noel the Elf was found with a gingerbread house ready to be decorated.  I once baked a gingerbread house from scratch but I had a conniption trying to get the walls to stick together with icing and it ended up looking like a total hovel.  I discovered prefabricated gingerbread houses when we emigrated and, therefore, they can become part of our family’s holiday traditions without me losing the plot.  The three younger boys had a lot of sticky fun decorating the house and eating the surplus construction supplies.

We decorated the house for Christmas right after Thanksgiving.  Mr Pict would rather wait until later into December but all the hassle involved in decorating makes me want to have it last for a good few weeks, more return for my investment.  I don’t go overboard.  We don’t decorate the exterior of the house.  Yet.  Mr Pict wants to get stuff for outside but I don’t know that I could deal with the additional hassle.  Bah humbug.  Sorting out the twinkly lights for the Christmas tree was quite enough stress, thanks very much.  It was worth it though: the formal living room has a lovely glow to it now.

The sweetest thing, however, is that my 6 and 8 year old boys made their own advent calendar.  Playing outside in the garden one evening, they gathered up 12 rocks and decorated them with a sharpie in order to depict the Twelve Days of Christmas.  They then brought it indoors and arranged it on the kitchen floor as a surprise.  Which it was.  A delightful surprise.  I do love it when my kids are creative, experience a spark of inspiration.  We now have the rocks arranged on the windowsill.  Just to add to the cuteness, my youngest keeps singing that the third day is “three henchmen”.  I am now changing the lyrics in our household.  That’s another new holiday tradition.

 

 

Cultural Exchanges

The Elementary School my younger boys attend is very good at utilising parental knowledge, skills and experience.  It is a very good way of including parents and embedding the school’s connection to the community.  It is also a great way of extending the education of the students, building in extra little titbits and exposing them to things they may have had no awareness of.  As a genuine, bona fide immigrant with a very definite accent, the staff at the school have been making use of me since the kids were enrolled in the school.  This may or may not have something to do with the fact that several of the teachers are entirely obsessed with the ‘Outlander’ series of novels which are set in historic Scotland.

Having read one class a traditional Scottish Traveller’s tale – The Hedgehurst – last year, I extended their knowledge of Scottish literature still further by talking to them about Robert Burns recently.  I was visiting as part of a series on tradition exchanges so the focus of my talk was on Burns’ Night.  I told them about the speeches, toasts and recitations; gave them a brief overview of the languages of Scotland; provided a potted biography of Robert Burns; and I read them excerpts from ‘Address to a Haggis’ and ‘To A Mouse’ in Scots and then provided an English translation.  What most engaged the children, however, was the talk about the food.  They were disgusted yet completely fascinated by the ingredients of haggis.  I assured them that many people find haggis very scrumptious indeed, including the little Pict who is their classmate, but I don’t think anyone was convinced, not one bit.  What’s not to love about sheep’s pluck mixed up with oatmeal and spices and stuffed inside a sheep’s stomach?  When I told them that I had brought a sample of some Scottish food for them to try, their little eyes popped wide open in revulsion and horror.  I quelled their panic by informing them that I had in fact brought small pots of cranachan for them to try.  If you have never heard of it, cranachan is a delectable concoction of cream, raspberries, honey and oatmeal soaked in whisky.  For obvious reasons I had switched the whiskey for vanilla essence.  I think that went down better with the kids than samples of haggis would have done.  In the course of my talk, I had to explain that haggis is illegal in America which is why I could not even provide one for the class to see.  That led to a whole tangent about Mad Cow Disease.  They were captivated by it.  Perhaps next time I should go in and talk to them about my knowledge of diseases (genuinely, one of my nerdy interests is plague).

The following week I was again foisting Scottish victuals onto children.  One of my sons has been working on a unit about different countries of the world and he was assigned Egypt for his project (which led him to  – just for fun – write the story of Osiris from the point of view of Set all written according to the hieroglyphic alphabet).  As part of their studies, the class were having a multicultural feast.  Each student could contribute a food or drink from either their country of study or a country relevant to their own cultural heritage.  As tempted as he was by sticky date treats, my 9 year old decided he wanted to contribute something Scottish to the feast.  I wrote recently about my husband finding a source of British food so he was duly packed off to hunt and gather half a dozen bottles of Irn Bru.  The feast was a huge success and my son enjoyed trying all of the different foods and drinks, several not previously familiar to him.  I am extremely happy to report that the Irn Bru (a Scottish soft drink) was a massive hit with the students.  I am pleased to have had a hand in introducing their tastebuds to an unfamiliar and slightly bizarre flavour.

Those are formal cultural exchanges, of course.  I am, however, also responsible for an informal cultural exchange.  I have been volunteering in my youngest son’s Kindergarten class a few times a week in order to assist the children with learning to write.  This involves me sounding out words to help them figure out which combination of letters to write down to create each syllable and construct each word.  It took me a while to realise that this was leading them to write with a Scottish accent.  There is no emphasis on accurate spelling, just on familiarity with letters and combinations of letters to produce the phonetic sounds of the words.  Therefore, when I was reading their work back, scribing the correct spellings beneath their writing, I was reading in a Scottish accent and as such not noticing that the sounds were wrong for American English.  Their writing was riddled with my clipped vowel sounds and Es in place of As.  Oops.  Since that epiphany, I have been having to adopt an American accent when sounding out certain phonemes.  In return, the children have been helping me remember my American vocabulary and have been correcting me when it comes to my apparent insistence that Z is “zed”.  I am not quite there yet but gradually they will get it fixed in my head that in this country I need to say “zee”.

Thanksgiving Weekend

I like Thanksgiving as a holiday and I am glad I now get to legitimately celebrate it.  As it is not related to a faith group or specific culture, it is inclusive (albeit that it is technically linked to a commemoration of colonising and persecuting an indigenous population) and everyone is off school and work at the same time.  There is no frenzy of gift buying and wrapping, no decking of the halls (at least not for us) and so the focus is just on togetherness and feasting.

Being relatively new to Thanksgiving, I am only just gradually trying and testing different traditions and seeing which fit and which do not.  This year, literally just two days before Thanksgiving, we had a painter in decorating our living rooms.  The house was topsy-turvy, with boxes of art work, ornaments, books and possessions, shelves and cushions stowed absolutely everywhere else in the house.  It was not conducive to organising anything and – in truth – I forgot to even meal plan until the day before.  And that was the day when my oldest son came down with a sickness bug so we were housebound.  Therefore, partly out of pragmatism and necessity and partly because I needed to use my time in other areas  – such as putting the house back together – I took some lazy options and decided to try some American traditional foods.

I love green bean casserole.  It’s delicious.  That is partly because I load it with even more strong cheese and wholegrain mustard than the recipe instructs but it is just entirely scrummy.  That’s a tradition I am totally on board with.  Brining the turkey ensured that it was succulent and juicy despite its massive bulk.  I am a roast potato fan but at least one of my kids claims he only likes potato if it is mashed so we decided to follow the American tradition of having mash.  To make it extra creamy, however, I added sour cream and cream cheese.  It was amazingly creamy and rich but my kids hated it.  No actually they loathed it.  Fail.  Back to the drawing board with the mash then.  We also used corn muffin mix rather than making them from scratch just because of time.  They were OK but not amazing.  The biggest fail of the day though was the stuffing.  In Britain, stuffing is normally based around sausage meat.  My intention, however, had been to make my mother-in-law’s recipe for rice and mushroom stuffing.  Again, however, my timings being scuppered we opted to try out traditional American stuffing which is based around seasoned bread.  It was horrid.  Nobody ate more than a morsel of it because it was so entirely bland both in flavour and texture.  Not doing that again.  None of our desserts were homemade this year either.  However, my husband and kids assure me that the pumpkin pie, pecan pie and fruit tart were delicious.  So our Thanksgiving feasting traditions will continue to evolve until we get a mixture of things we all enjoy – or which the majority of us enjoy at least.  And next year we won’t schedule lots of upheaval just before the holidays either.

The following evening, we took a trip out to Shady Brook Farm to see their Holiday Light Show.  This was another attempt at forging a tradition since we had also gone there last year.  The car drives through the displays of light which makes for some lazy spectating but keeps everyone contained and cosy.  My kids each had a blanket in the car with them.  The first section was themed around the song ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ so we all sang the song, loudly, as we drove past each section of lights, often in a tuneless muddle but it was fun nevertheless.  We also liked the sea themed section, the landmarks of the world and fairy tale sections.  The displays all seemed to be the same designs as we had seen last year but that was OK as everyone enjoyed the twinkly lights – especially the tunnels of lights we drove through.

After the driving section, we parked up and wandered around the produce market section.  While festive music played and synchronised lights twinkled and flashed, people were toasting s’mores around fire pits and aromas of salty kettle popcorn, melting chocolate and fried

dough filled the air, wafting at us temptingly from the surrounding stalls.  We capitulated to temptation and bought a toasty hot funnel cake which the boys devoured in a matter of seconds, like hyenas ripping through a downed wildebeest.  I should have made funnel cake and s’mores for Thanksgiving dinner.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Eurovision

As of this past Saturday, I have now officially missed out on the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time in my life.

Watching Eurovision was a tradition in my household growing up, a tradition I then introduced Mr Pict to and which became part of our calendar as a couple and a tradition that then grew to include our children once they were old enough to stay up late on a Saturday night.  Therefore, what I am really missing is the loss of one of our deeply ingrained family traditions.

It is possible that if you have always lived outside Europe you have zero idea of what I am even referring to in this blog entry.  Let me clue you in.  The Eurovision Song Contest has been held every year since 1956 and involves member countries submitting a song.  Each song is then performed on one (very long) evening and each member country gets to vote on which they like best which then determines the winner, nominally the most popular song.  The contest was long enough when I was a wee lassie but, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent creation of new nations, the number of member states has increased massively in the last quarter of a century so that now they have to hold semi-finals and the voting takes an even more interminably long time.

In the decades before I was born, Eurovision was taken quite seriously.  It was regarded as an honour for a country to win and to then host the next year’s contest and the acts performing the song could have their careers significantly boosted by a win or even an appearance.  Some credible careers – such as Abba – were launched by success at Eurovision.  The joy of Eurovision, however, is that in more recent decades the musical and artistic merit has declined so that the songs are utter drivel, frequently sung out of key and the performances are often bizarre.  It is an absolutely wonderful night of randomly kitsch and camp entertainment.  For most of my life, the BBC’s commentator on the night’s events was the DJ Terry Wogan who would make sarcastic quips as the show progressed and gradually sink into his cups as the voting stretched out before him.  He retired and was replaced by another sardonic Irishman, Graham Norton.  A lot of the pleasure of watching Eurovision was the commentator’s witty put downs reflecting our own view of the show.

Then there is the voting.  There is admittedly not a great deal of merit in any of the songs or performances but merit is rarely how Eurovision is won.  Instead, there are complex political relationships at work which lead to certain countries always awarding top points to the same allies every single year and denying points to countries with which they have fraught relationships, regardless of the quality of effort.  It is actually perfectly possible to predict what some countries will award from the “public voting” each year.  In recent years it has also been the case that some countries have, it is suspected, deliberately thrown the contest because they do not want to win.  Winning involves hosting the following year.  This can be a drain on finances for some and a welcome boost to tourism for others.  If, however, you are like Ireland and have hosted several times then it might be time to submit a song performed by a puppet turkey.  That actually happened.  It is believed that singing in English creates an advantage.  There was a rule for a time that songs had to be sung in each country’s native language but it was determined this unfairly advantaged the English speaking nations since English is the second language of most European countries.  If you have ever sat through Eurovision then you might agree with me that actually it is probably advantageous to sing in the most obscure language and dialect possible so that as few people as possible can understand that the lyrical content is entirely dire.  I also think part of the fun is hearing other languages and it is always a bonus when a country decides to go for a bit of a flourish using an ethnic instrument of some kind- double bonus if done so while wearing some bonkers version of national costume.

Anyway, our  Pict family tradition was to score each country’s performance out of 20 with a maximum of ten marks being awarded for the song, five for the performance and five for the costumes.  As a family that usually meant that there was much discussion surrounding how low the score should be for each song and it also meant it was possible for our top scorers to have sung in a way that emulated a camel belching so long as they had a top drawer performance and some natty costumes.  In recent years we have evolved the tradition of eating nachos in front of the TV while chortling through the musical turns and debating whether the song that made our ears wither deserved even a single point.  Of course, the children also love the fact that they get to stay up late – really quite late indeed – while glutting themselves on telly watching.  There is also an unspoken tradition of seeing who can come up with the most scathing put down or come up with the most witty one liner about a song or performance.   The boys do quite well in that regard.  My apprentices.

But no more.

Possibly next year I will find the time to investigate if the Eurovision’s website broadcasts the event online in any other way than live.  A Saturday afternoon will never do for Eurovision for one reason or another but watching it “as live” in the evening would be fabulous.  So long as I manage to avoid the news of who the winner is which I singly failed to do this year.  I turned on the BBC World News and learned that 2014’s winner was Austria with a song performed by a pretty drag performer with a beard.  Now that’s Eurovision at its most magnificent!

Christmas Traditions

Christmas was always going to be very different for us this year as we have always spent that time with the boys’ grandparents.  This year it was going to be just the six of us.  While clearly missing out on some of our family traditions as a result, my husband and I decided to spin that into a positive opportunity to establish some Pict family traditions of our own, tailor Christmas to the six of us, and determined to fuse established rituals and habits and fuse them with new experiences which – if successful – could become traditions to carry forward into future festive seasons.

By coincidence, as we were discussing this plan, I was invited by my six year old’s teacher to talk to her First Grade class about Christmas in Scotland as part of their “tradition trade”, and that gave me an opportunity to synthesise what the key customs were from our own family and cultural background, focusing on the ones that were most important to carry forward.  Of course, most things are just the same as in the US – letters to Santa, stockings hung on Christmas Eve and snacks left out for Santa and the reindeer.  Traditionally in Scotland a turkey or a goose would be the centrepiece of the meal but we decided that, so soon after Thanksgiving and with the price of them, we would have a plump chicken instead.  We definitely wanted to have roast potatoes and roasted parsnips which led Mr Pict on a quest all over town trying to find some.  I am assuming those are not such a popular root vegetable in America.  The kids in the class had just about heard of them though only my own child could recognise them in the photo.  Shame because parsnips are actually my favourite vegetable.  Mr Pict and our 8 year old also wanted brussel sprouts.  To me they smell like sweaty bum crack (the word for which is a shuck in Scots as in “If ye didnae hae a shuck ye’d droon”) and taste acrid and bitter.  But they are traditional and so they too were purchased.  Normally there would be Christmas pudding (round and steamed and served ablaze) and Christmas cake (hard, dry fruit cake covered in a layer of marzipan and icing) but none of us really appreciate those so we continued our own tradition by opting out of those and having different desserts instead.  As you will gather, reader, most of our festive rituals revolve around our mouths and stomachs.  One thing I thought I would have a hard time finding in the US was Christmas crackers, as I know they are not part of the festive culture here.  For the uninitated, these are tubes of thin card covered in cheery paper and closed at each end and, when pulled, they make a bang and the contents are revealed, said contents being a paper crown (which it is compulsory to wear), some wee toy or item, and some corny jokes.  I was so thrilled to find some in a local discount store that I literally jumped up and down with glee as I snatched them off the shelf.

Here’s my 6 year old pulling a cracker with me over Christmas dinner:

 

And this is my husband and me wearing our cracker crowns:

So those were the old traditions; now for the new.

The first was not of my own design.  It was part of the Elementary School’s programme and something I understand is done in schools up and down the land – but it was new to us, of course, and that was Polar Express Day at school.  I have a love-hate relationship with the movie ‘Polar Express’ (I’ve never read the book) in that I like the concept of taking a journey to rediscover the magic, wonder and joy of belief but to my mind that is rather undermined by the dead-eyed mo-cap animation of the human characters, some of the misery being just too cold and gloomy and the fact the central character is difficult to like.  Not my thing it’s fair to say.  My triumvarate of Christmas movies are ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’, ‘Muppets Christmas Carol’ and ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’.  The last day of school before Winter break was designated as Polar Express Day so the boys went to school in their jammies, had hot chocolate and other treats and made crafts and generally had festive fun.  It was a charming way to end the term.  I am glad they could be part of that tradition.

The weekend before Christmas, we took the boys to a nearby Holiday Light Show.  It was at the same farm where we had experienced Halloween fun and purchased pumpkins so it covered a vast area.  We drove through the Light Show which was fun and cosy.  We each oohed and aahed over each design.  Some of the designs were really elaborate, with lots of mobile elements or animations, but the simple ones were also very effective.  There were themes as we drove through, starting with designs indicating corporate sponsors, the Twelve Days of Christmas, fairy tales, the nativity, world landmarks and animals.  My favourite part was driving through a tunnel of twinkling lights.  It made for a lovely evening and next year we might even stay longer in order to toast marshmallows over the fire pits but we had not had our dinner so we went for a nosh up at Cracker Barrel instead.

 

We’ve always done the tradition of new jammies as a Christmas Eve gift because, frankly, I want the kids to look decent in the photos of Christmas morning as well as giving them some new pyjamas just because they could do with them.  This year, however, we upscaled the Christmas Eve gift a little.  I bought each of the boys a Christmas tree ornament that was perfect for them in order to serve as an annual reminder of their first Christmas in America, the idea being they would then have it to start their own individual collections of tree ornaments when they eventually grow up and leave home.  Mr Pict’s contribution was to forage for some European sweet treats for us to munch along with some luscious hot chocolate.

In the end, all of our forging of traditions old and new worked a treat and we had a superb Christmas.  We were relaxed and content throughout the day and most of all the boys were blissfully happy and that ultimately was the critical thing.  We were striving to make their first Christmas in America a memorable one and that mission was accomplished.

Happy Holidays!

Breakfast with Santa

On Saturday, I took three of my boys to have breakfast with Santa – the 8 year old opted out.  This was a first experience for all of us.  Perhaps they do this in Britain too but I was not aware of it until we moved here.

The event was being held just around the corner from us so we toddled off in the chill wind but were soon indoors in the cosy eating mess which was filled with the aromas of scrummy breakfast treats.  When we paid our money, we were each given a chit of paper that we had to fill out stating which particular elements of cooked breakfast we wanted.  We then handed those in and, while it was all being cooked, we were able to spend some time with Santa.

My kids have not had much in the way of Santa encounters.  In the town we moved from, a Santa would travel around on a motorised sleigh just ahead of Christmas, pulling into each street and handing out chocolates to children.  He usually pulled up our shared driveway and my boys would scamper out in their jammies (because somehow I always forgot Santa was expected), exchange a quick few words through chattering teeth and then scurry back indoors again.  However, they have never visited a store-based Santa or a grotto.  My children are aware, incidentally, that these Santas are all just the real Santa’s helpers because obviously Santa himself is way too busy at this time of year to be patronising various events across the globe.  For that reason, therefore, I was not entirely sure how happy they would be with meeting and greeting Santa.

My four year old was perfectly content.  He launched himself onto Santa’s knee and had a good chinwag with him, explaining to Santa that he had asked him for Disney Infinity for the PS3 just to drive the point home.  I actually didn’t think he would ever get back down from Santa’s knee.  My six year old was a bit more trepidatious.  He was not prepared to sit on Santa’s lap so he stood beside him instead and spoke in a voice only hummingbirds could hear.  My ten year old was, of course, far too mature and cool for any such things so he just high-fived Santa.

 

We then ate a delicious breakfast.  The boys had pancakes, eggs and sausages with hot chocolate and fruit juice and I had a veggie omelette with a cup of tea.  There were also baked goods available so the boys each had a massive muffin before deciding they were starting to get bellies like Santa’s.

I definitely think we should build breakfasting with Santa into our festive traditions from now on.