One of my favourite Christmas films is Santa Clause: The Movie. One, because it's generally awesome and invokes many memories of my childhood Christmases but also because it has an amazing idea in it. This being the idea of Christmas Two. Okay, so the idea was dreamed up by the evil B.Z. who ended up floating off to whoknowswhere full of exploding candy canes, but you have to admit it is a cracking concept.
To be able to repeat Christmas part way through the year, before the next actual Christmas, would be fantastic.
We hear so much about the January blues. We work so hard to plan Christmas. Buying presents, planning food, listening to the Christmas songs, and looking forward to a rest at the end of the year. And then the big moment arrives and seems to leave all too quickly. And we're left with a 'what now?' moment. Work looms, January looms and (unless you are a January baby like me and have a birthday to look forward to) there may not be any other big events coming up in the near future.
I read a statistic somewhere about a Monday in mid-January being the day when a lot of people think about leaving their jobs. I don't imagine this has that much to do with their actual jobs being rubbish but just the 'down' feeling after the high of Christmas has passed.
But hang on, this is just for adults this feeling, isn't it? What about the kids?
As a child, I wished it could be Christmas every day. I never gave any thought to the un-sustainability of that idea. It just sounded enormous amounts of fun. Come to think of it, that might be a future Dragon's Den idea. A company that organises Christmas every day. Anyway, I digress. I did wish for that. And I can imagine my own children wishing it too when they have more of a handle on what time means.
My children are still little - two and nearly four- so they are in the grip of loving Santa, loving Christmas, loving presents and the fun stuff, but they don't understand that Christmas has an end. When I told my daughter that Christmas lasted all week, she took that to mean that Santa would come every night (that took some explaining). Now, as we come to the end of that week, she asks lots of questions about the end of Christmas.
I wish I could keep that Christmas magic alive for the children and not let them feel the same January blues so many of us grown ups feel. Maybe having the presents from Santa to play with will help to prevent that anyway. Maybe they are too young to comprehend that next Christmas is a whole year away. Or maybe the blues are what we grown ups feel because we realise the next year of hard, grown up stuff is here already and whilst it is exciting to enter a new year with lots of promise and opportunity, it does sometimes feel like a longer break is needed before we embark on that.
Maybe the answer to all of this is just to follow the advice of that amazing film and do it all again very soon. Let's have it on March 25th and let's call it Christmas Two.