Advent

The 1st of December means two things to my children: advent calendars and the Christmas carol CD. Every year Granny seeks out beautiful advent calendars (the ones with pictures inside the doors, glittery nativity scenes and snowy villages) and either brings them or sends them in time for December.

For the last week the children have been sporadically wondering whether Granny remembered to send them in time, until yesterday I relented and revealed that they were already stashed in the spare room from her last visit. Of course then there was no peace until I got them out and much poring over them was done. Youngest has a clever one with a different sticker for each day, which gradually puts all the animals into the nativity scene, but was eying the others' glittery ones too, trying to weigh up glitter versus stickers and work out if she'd been short-changed! (She does like it Granny, don't worry!)

Ryan (our farm employees's son, who goes to school with the children and spends his afternoons here) was looking puzzled at the advent calendars, so my son explained the whole idea to him. I'd mentioned making them for people when I was at school and he was seized by the idea of making a calendar for Ryan, so that he'd have one too. All yesterday afternoon he drew the main picture, marked out the windows, drew little pictures for inside the windows, carefully cut the sides of the window flaps with a Stanley knife, then today he glued it together and presented it to Ryan, with careful instructions of when to open each door.

The Christmas carol CD will no doubt be tunefully playing in the background several times a day from tomorrow, to get us in the right mood for making presents, cakes and mince pies now the weather has finally turned summery.