Midsummer Christmas Eve

As a Kiwi living in the UK, my husband has always talked about having hot and sunny Christmas’ and I know he wished that we could experience them too. We also wanted the kids to have a big treat as they had been so good in lockdown for the last 12 weeks and Penny was due back to school. So we planned what turned out to be the greatest pretend adventure ever!

Christmas Cards

It turns out that you can buy Christmas craft stuff from Baker Ross all year round! Not only that, but in the summer it’s heavily discounted so I bought extra kits for real Christmas! We love any kind of glitter but Christmas glitter is definitely the best glitter and so we put some Christmas tunes on and made granny and grandad a Christmas card

Making Ice Cream

I had a jar of mince pie filling left from real Christmas and came up with a recipe of my own inventing! I cooked the mince pie filling for a few minutes to melt the suet and let it cool. Then Freddie and I mixed it with half a carton of Vanilla ice cream. It was totally brilliant and tasted like rum and raisin ice-cream. We then made little star shaped biscuits to stick in it like a flake and to sort of give the pastry taste. I’m pretty proud of this recipe.

Decorating the Tree

We always have a real tree at Christmas but I do have another one I put in the dining room that was £30 from eBay. We got it out of the loft with the decorations just from that tree (which came off a Primark advent calendar) and really enjoyed decorating it. The funny thing was that only doing a few simple things made it more pleasurable. Freddie really enjoyed this bit, as he has just turned three I even think this might be his earliest Christmas memory. I wonder if he will think he really had Christmas in New Zealand.

Movie Time!

We found Elf on our Sky recordings from real Christmas which is a family favourite and so the kids got to pick some goodies and they snuggled up on the sofa. Freddie laughed so hard when Elf burped that I thought he was going to explode. We also managed to dig out our matching family PJs from the loft, though sadly no photos exist of Mark or I wearing them. The great thing is that this family adventure cost very little but a dig around the loft and didn’t involve leaving home at all.

Stockings

My mum is fantastic at sewing and she was more than happy to make the kids some summery stockings. Obviously if you aren’t as crafty you could reuse stockings from real Christmas – or you could even get the kids to design their own starting with a blank stocking like this one and decorating them with stickers showing summery scenes.

Being Mummy-Santa

Of course, the kids knew that it wasn’t real Christmas and, as Santa doesn’t work in the summer, they knew that any presents they got were from me (and largely thanks to https://www.homebargains.co.uk/) so Penny insisted on leaving ‘Mummy-Santa’ a snack. Mummy-Santa was very delighted with the red wine and chocolate. So delighted in fact that she had another!

To end the evening when the kids were in bed we played Trivial Pursuit, just like Mark did in New Zealand many years ago and it was lovely. You can read all about our Christmas Day here.