Oh dear. This year my lass actually has the freebie that came with a Donald Duck magazine as an advent calendar, and that’s it. Not that she doesn’t seem happy about it, but seeing Looby Lu’s makes me squirm with guilt. It’s even environmentally friendly: activities, not toys! The Donald Duck one won’t really lead to toys, just to rampant commercialism and unrealistic Christmas wishlists: turns out there are little quizzes every day and you go to the website and guess and you can win this ridiculous assortment of snowboards, game consoles and electronic guitars. And get stuck playing games on disney.no for an hour.

I’m such a bad mother. I mean, just look at that beautiful box of origami-papered activities. Oh dear. It’s almost made worse by knowing that it probably didn’t take more than 30 minutes to actually just do. And she has a Flickr set.

No, haven’t put up any decorations yet either.

4 thoughts on “the guilt of christmas

  1. Jason

    It could be worse. You could be saying to yourself, “My child is only 6 months old, he’ll never know if we don’t do a full blow xmas”, or allow terrible santa picture like this one to be taken. Maybe he’ll forgive us one day.

    Decorations are overrated; we enjoy being the dark house on the block. I’m just waiting to get the nasty letter from the home owners association.

  2. scott

    What you need is an inflatable snow globe for the front lawn. That’ll make your child happy AND impress your neighbors.

  3. Jill

    I’m getting the snow globe. Already did the terrible santa picture 🙂

  4. jill/txt » celebrations and costumes

    […] Don’t feel too sorry for us though. Here the dress-up-in-costume-and-get-sweets-from-the-neighbours-day is New Year’s Eve (or between Christmas and New Year in other parts of Norway) when kids always, always, always go carolling and always come home with ridiculous quantities of sweets. Norwegian kids get presents EVERY DAY in December in their advent calendars, which have little to do with religion in today’s Norway and everything to do with daily individually wrapped presents. (This year I have a nice big one ready with lots of pockets, and I bought the first present yesterday – much better than that horrid Donald Duck calendar she had two years ago, and that Tom reminded me of at the Edit 8.0 conference. Me, I’d managed to obliterate that memory of bad parenting, but the blog doesn’t lie. Well, not much. […]

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