Wood for the Trees

On Christmas eve this post popped up on my Facebook feed Black bin bags at the ready indeed. Christmas creates so much waste. We buy things with the sole purpose of throwing them away. Christmas cards which get put up for a couple of weeks then thrown away or at best recycled. Wrapping paper which gets torn open and scattered across your living room. Crackers. There is a Michael Macintyre skit where he asks what happened to the things we won in crackers. You don't get people saying anyone fancy a game of cards with this set of miniature cards that I won at Christmas? Because they end up in the bin that's why. To be honest, my least favourite Christmas tasks are writing cards and wrapping presents and to have an environmental excuse not to do them is somewhat of a relief. Last year we used blankets and reused paper bags to put the presents in. Were my children, then aged 2 and 5 disappointed not to come down to beautifully wrapped presents? No. They were more concerned ab...

I decided this year that now my youngest is getting to the age where she can cope with simple games that a nice family tradition to start would be to buy a Christmas board game that we could all enjoy. This year following reviews from Let Toys Be Toys we bought the cooperative game Dinosaur Escape. The synopsis is that you are helping 3 dinosaurs to escape the mainland to dinosaur island before the volcano erupts. You need to turn over a token with a matching dinosaur to the one in the same quadrant to move to the island. You each take it in turns to roll the dice, move a dinosaur and turn over a token (or add a piece of volcano if you roll a volcano picture). As a cooperative game it helps children to learn sharing and teamwork by suggesting which dinosaur to move and helping each other to remember what the flipped over tokens are. It says 4+ on the box but comes with instructions for younger players (you leave the tokens over so don't need to remember them) and with a b...

For the last few years alongside our normal advent calendar we have also been doing a Reverse Advent Calendar. If you haven't come across this before, this is where you put an item of food in a box for each day of advent for Food bank. Some Food banks issue a list of suggestions of what to put in each day like this one from Islington Food bank: Others suggest starting earlier in November to ensure the food gets to the food bank in time for Christmas. We find out from the food bank which items are in short supply and try to include a high amount of these items. Then drop some each week at church as church has a food bank drop off point. There are also often drop off points at different local facilities such as supermarkets, community centres or to the food bank themselves. Then for each day of advent the kids pick out an item each to put in the box. And they really have gotten on board with this! My 6yo was reasoning her choices. "Yesterday I picked vegetables a...