Countdown to Christmas: Week 1

The best way to describe our first week of Christmas countdown is that it's a mixed bag.

After announcing that I am not going to come up with 24 different activities this December, I found the advent calendar that my mother-in-law bought for Tiger when he was a baby and thought it best to take it out and use it before Tiger's childhood is over.  So, I stayed up on the night of November 30th to do some last minute brainstorming and managed to stretch my initial short list of activities to fill 24 days.

Since I have the habit of over-preparing than under-preparing most of the time, I wrapped the Christmas-related books that I borrowed from the library in Christmas wrappers to act as another form of advent calendar (just in case the other one doesn't work, for whatever reason), so that Tiger can unwrap one book each day to read a Christmas-related story.  That's the least we can do, if we don't do anything else for the month.

I really needn't worry, because the RI has a space-related advent calendar ready so we have been unveiling it each day, after I read aloud a section from our spine book for the month, The Christmas Almanac.  The book covers a broad spectrum of Christmas-related issues from history to traditions, both religious and secular.

There is a section in the book explaining the origins and different ranks of angels in the Western tradition which coincides with the weekly video of the Angel Trail organised by the National Gallery, so we watched the first episode of that.

The rest of the week was interspersed with the making of mince meat,

as well as mince pies.

We would have done more this week if Tiger hadn't been ill with high fever most of the time.  In fact, he spent most of the week lying on the sofa, recovering from nights of broken sleep.

He is still suffering from fever as I type.  We are taking him to see the out-of-hours doctor in a little while, since our usual GP does not work on weekends.  I hope next week will be a better week.


This post is linked up to Christmas In A Box ~ Week 1 Link Up.