Dear Ken
You won’t read this until next Christmas, so here are a few things you will have forgotten by then. I know this because you forget them every year:
1) Wrapping the gifts you’ve just spent far too much money on, do not take “just an hour” to wrap the night before. You will be up until way past midnight wrapping away with a bad back, cursing yourself for not remembering this from last time.
2) Buy some more tape before you want to do the wrapping. The roll of sticky tape you have had for most of the year that “should be adequate” will have been used by your daughter just hours beforehand for some unmentioned project that involves enough sticky tape to everything in the house to everything else.
3) That little scrap of wrapping paper you think will just cover that gift? It won’t. Don’t even try it. You will save 10 minutes of your life not attempting mathematic calculations to make it fit somehow.
4) The kids will not be asleep at their normal time on Christmas Eve just because they have run around like mad things all day with great excitement. Santa will not be able to visit their room and deliver the stocking gifts before around 2 in the morning. It’s ok. The presents probably won’t be wrapped much before that anyway.
5) Despite the fact you hate it, don’t attempt to delete Band Aid from your music collection. The wife will insist you play it and “how can it possibly be Christmas without it?”
6) The kids are just not going to appreciate you playing that Neil Diamond album all through Christmas no matter how you go misty-eyed and tell them what an important part of your childhood his music was at Christmas. You are still going to play it though.
7) You never get tired of watching Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. It must be the original Muppets version, of course.
8) This year, you can’t take that cool, fancy science toy thingy that one of your kids got and tell them “Oh it needs an adult to help you with this. I’ll take it to keep it safe and we’ll do it together later in the week”. You won’t. A year later, it will remain on your shelf untouched, no matter how much they have begged for it through that time.
9) You don’t need a big carrot for Rudolph. He really just does not like carrots that much and he will feel quite sick by the end of chomping away at it leaving the end of it as evidence to the kids that “Santa has been here”. You don’t want him to feel sick on Christmas day do you? You know he’ll be grumpy…
10) In 2011 the kids are probably still too small to be able to watch Die Hard on Christmas Eve despite how cool the last song is. Singing Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow raucously is not a good enough reason to let them see gratuitous violence and there are just too many “F words” to get away with it. Yet.
Merry Christmas old boy. Try to remember to enjoy it…
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