St. Nicholas

St Nicholas visited Good Shepherd this Sunday (does ANYONE have a picture?) and then circled back through town Monday night bringing the four girls very pretty tea spoons (which he got online from a really fabulous place in Canada) and the boys camping knife/fork/spoon pocket implements in their own little cases. St. Nicholas, as usual, fretted very much about everybody being happy and went to bed at midnight the night before thinking that someone would maybe have rather had an actual toy.

And, of course, he fretted very much that he had bought stupid Santa chocolate lollypops instead of buying a St. Nicholas’ bishops mold and making his own chocolates. Also, he was foolish enough to put handfuls of chocolate coins in each shoe instead of carefully counting to make sure each child had the same number of chocolates.

Fortunately for him, after the initial screaming and shouting, everybody was able to settle down and make it fair. And the spoons turned out to be good for eating soft boiled eggs, drinking tea, and having relationships with each other as they appeared to take on the personalities of dolls. And the pocket implements were AWESOME and were good for eating both breakfast and supper, for cutting a small wooden dowel into bits of sawdust and for becoming a more cool person. Eventually, though, some people were just too exhausted to keep eating chocolate, and eating with the special spoons, much as they would have liked to.

Anyway the house was well prepared for his visited. Monday we managed to dig some things out of boxes. (WRETCHED baby finger prints on camera lenses.)

And snapped our very clever fake pre-lit tree together. As I have shouted to anyone who will listen over the past few weeks, When All The Children Can Walk and Buckle Themselves In The Car And Cut the Tree and Drag It To The Car And Drive the Car then we’ll get a real tree. Until then, the magic of Christmas is a fake pre-lit tree. Tuesday morning as I groped my way towards the light, deeply regretting having any children at all, much less six, I said to Matt, “Wouldn’t it be great if this was it? If now we went back to our normal lives and there was no insanity in three + weeks?”

He looked at me in abject horror. “Oh, I guess not,” I said. But if I was in charge of everything……its probably too horrible to even say out loud.

st. nicholas