Following your alarming description of perfect preparation for Christmas this year Grace I have decided that I really MUST sort myself out.
I can obviously give my husband as a present to anyone that might want him so that’s one present out of the way but it was time yesterday to do my yearly tipping out of all the plastic bags that have been collecting presents ever since May and see what’s still to shop for. I found to my delight that all the Christmas stockings are complete as bits and bobs have been popped into these bags obliviously for so long now that I had forgotten quite how much had already been bought. So the result is thatI have 6 presents left to buy and that’s it!
Ah! no of course there are the teachers and Heads to buy for too!! Should the children make star shaped biscuits sprinkled with love and affection or should I buy each one something special to show how much we appreciate their use of foul and sarcastic language in class and for teaching the pupils so well in this particular school that they would no doubt fail an outside examination if they were to sit one today (they have and they did) …………..! Biscuits.
Long gone are the days of parent to teacher gifts of Prada handbags and when all one could see on the last day of term was an sea of racing green Harvey Nichols bags carrying extraordinarily expensive gifts for school staff. I remember vividly arriving on that famous last day of the autumn term at a particular school in London for the first time, I freaked out completely, settled my daughter in to her classroom, put the perfectly wrapped presents that I was about to hand out back in their plastic bags and went shopping all over again to replace the gifts I had already bought because I was so embarrassed at how small they were in comparison to the gifts of the others. In retrospect I can’t imagine what on earth I was thinking, I must have somehow felt that the size of my gift would equal how genial the teachers would be to my daughter in the following twelve months….. possibly a little truth in there? Anyway I’m over all that now and the teachers are lucky to get a cow-pat these days!
As the end of term looms I will say that it has been a relatively successful one for me at the school gates. I have followedFirst Eleven Magazine’srules of the gates (always a useful read) and haven’t gossiped about other parents or children, I have been open to new friends and coffee mornings, tried to include others and be helpful, but best of all I haven’t worried too much about anything and although I feel that nothing much has changed YET at Country School I am not as allergic to the place as I was last year!
Ellie xxx