Hello Plus Members and welcome to your Sunday episode. I have a very special guest with me today. And as our last episode was diving deep into Christmas traditions, I am going to now have a little conversation with my very good friend and partner in life, Nick, about just our general personal Christmas traditions. Hi Nick. How are you? Hi Anna. I'm well. So, I want you to tell me about some of the Christmas traditions you remember from being a child because for me, it was all like really magical. How was it for you? I think Christmas is magical for most kids who've got even half decent parents. And so I hope to be able to bring some of that magic to ours. To our children. To our children. Yeah. And to us as well. One of the things that my parents definitely did a really good job of was allowing us to get up in the morning find our stockings and go and explore them on our own. Oh really? For an hour or two on Christmas morning. I can imagine you getting up at like five, six in the morning and then being like,"Yeah, sure, just go and sort yourself out. Have a few hours to yourself." And really what they're doing is making sure they get an extra few hours in bed, right? Yeah. They knew exactly what they were doing. And I wonder because I don't remember Christmases prior to where my parents currently live. And when I was young, that building was a bungalow. Okay, so your parents have done an extension into the roof to make it a two-storey house? That's correct, yeah. Okay. And we live in a two-storey house. Yeah. And so, I've genuinely been thinking for a couple of years now, I think, about what age we would let the children wake up in the morning and take themselves downstairs? Like, can we trust them? Can we trust them? What would we come down to if we just left them to their own devices? But it's also joined up with when do we take away the baby gates? Oh yeah, because we still have baby gates at the top and bottom of our stairs. I don't think we should ever take the baby gates away, but that's not because of the children, that's more because I feel more secure when the gates are shut at night time. Because if a burglar came in, they wouldn't be able to figure out the baby gates, because nobody can if you don't know them, there's a special trick. In the dark. In the dark and they're noisy. They really creak, don't they? Like,'eeeeeek'. So, if someone's trying to come in quietly, they're either going to have to really climb over these gates or they're going to make loads of noise and wake the house up. So I feel more secure with them. Yeah. But what kinds of things did you get in your stockings? So, my mum always used to put in fruits because she thought it was useful to shape the stockings. So my stockings were not like the stockings you've bought for the children, which are you know beautiful, soft kind of velour red fabrics shaped perfectly with a name on. Mine were genuinely my dad's woolly socks. Clean, clean. I hope. Yeah clean, but knee-high, these dark navy woolly socks that were about two to three feet long. Enormous things. So having a banana to shape the ankle was really important actually. You had a banana in your stocking? A banana in the stocking, an orange at the bottom. Yeah, I always had a tangerine. That always seemed like a tradition to have a tangerine in your stocking. Yeah, we always had tangerines. And so just like I'm sure our kids would, as you're pulling it out to check all the toys, you get to the fruit and it's just apples and bananas, willy-nilly. And were the gifts, because it's often just little small trinkets, isn't it, in a stocking? Were those gifts for you, were they wrapped individually within the stocking to add to the kind of, like, delayed gratitude kind of thing, like,"Oh I'm gonna... I've got to unwrap this"? Do you know, I don't think they were. You just like tip it all out and you had a few bits and bobs to play with, maybe some pencil crayons. Well I think I'm quite good at delayed gratitude so I used to take them out one at a time. Take your time. And play with them, which might have been different if they were all wrapped up because then you choose which ones to open first, right? It's interesting that you do that because when you eat, you have a very different character. Like, if I give you some chocolate or a pudding, a nice dessert, it's gone within seconds. Like, you just, a piece of chocolate, a large piece of chocolate, you just put the whole thing in and just chew it and swallow it down. Whereas, I'm a nibbler, because I like delayed gratitude as well, so I take my time, but you're just like'nom-nom-nom'. And it's gone. So, the fact that you're saying to me, I like to take my time over my stocking. I find that, I find that quite hard to believe, but I'll go with it. I don't do it so much now, but when I was younger, I'd always save my favourite food item on my plate until last. Right, yeah. And sometimes friends would say like,"Are you not going to eat that? That's the best bit. Like are you gonna, you're leaving it?""Can I have it?" Yeah,"Can I have it?" And I would be like,"Don't be ridiculous of course I'm keeping it to the end." Save the best till last, the common phrase, right? And I think that's, I do the same. It's because I'd like to have the nicest taste in my mouth to savour and to remember the meal by. Whereas if you eat all the best bits and then you've got like sprouts or something bitter at the very end and that's all you have lingering in your mouth and on your taste buds afterwards. Yeah. But let's bring it back to back to stocking presents. Moving away from stockings'cause that is the first thing in the morning. What about the main event, the main presents? When do you have those? So, we used to, so let's just pause on stockings just for the last bit. So, your question, your first question to me, which I did a terrible job of answering, was"What sort of presents were in the stocking?" And I think, going back to my mum wanting to keep us occupied as long as possible, she would give us typically small activity-type presents. So, this was pre-computer games. You'd get these plastic cubes, ones I remember, I don't remember what the actual puzzle was inside, but they'd have little plastic levers that you'd spring or hit or push to move a ball or something around on the inside. Those sorts of things. Some, you know, active toys that were a dinosaur or something along those sorts of lines and often I'd have a blue one, my sister would have a red one, my brother would have a green one. That type of stuff. So, because my mum would focus on giving us toys that we would play with all morning and my dad could get on with cooking the dinner, we... so, my mum had a rule: no presents until after the Queen's speech. Ah, which is usually three o'clock or was. Late Queen, wasn't she? I don't remember. It was just torture or whatever. So, for us, I believe our presents were done after everyone had breakfast and we were properly dressed and everyone was present So, everyone was there. They were present for the presents. So we'd, yeah, have stockings and our pyjamas first thing in the morning, everyone a bit bog-eyed and tired. I love that word, bog eyed. Like your eyes popping out your head. And then once everyone had dressed for the occasion, because we always wore our best clothes on Christmas Day. And once we were dressed and we'd had breakfast, then we could all sit around the tree and my mum would hand out the presents and we'd do it one at a time and all watch each other, which I always found a little bit uncomfortable. I don't like people watching me when I unwrap presents. I feel like I have to perform when I open. Go,"Oh wow, thank you!" And sometimes you get presents that you're like,"What is that?" I mean, we've experienced that, haven't we? Let's not go. And that's a story for another time. Yeah, and so, what do you think we should do with the children then? As much as we've tried to reduce the amount of presents our children get, we have very generous families who like to buy many presents, and we always get a little bit carried away, don't we? And so our children get lots of presents. So, I'd like to delay main present opening until maybe just before dinner or at some point mid-morning. But really what we have to do is just steadily open presents all day. Well, I was gonna say I think that's the best the best approach, right. So, they get something small in the stockings when they first wake up to take the edge off the excitement and give them something to play with. Yeah, like replenish some of the things they need like stationery is good for stockings, a nice pair of socks, nice woolly socks or, you know, cartoon socks. Just something to be fun and entertaining and get them to stop pestering us and allow us to continue to get ready and start preparing for Christmas. Mm hmm. And then... And an orange, of course. And an orange and a satsuma. And then, so I think, and with our view of what Christmas is gonna be in a few weeks time, once everything's in the oven and it's getting ready, that you then would have ten or fifteen minutes maybe to... share another round of opening presents, and then you have your dinner. And then a few more. And then you can finish it finish off in the afternoon, really. Yeah. So, you get a few a few periods. Because I think it's very easy with excited children for them to just descend into opening as many presents as you can all at once, everybody doing their own. Yeah. And you lose the event. And you miss it, yeah. You want to enjoy with them the surprise and the awe as they open up each present and then you want them to appreciate every gift that they've been given, because sometimes it does become just a throw that on the pile,"What's the next thing?" Yeah. And they forget that they've got... Why don't you open that one? I just got excited! That's not yours. Yeah, and this is because our children are very young. I think as they become a little older, then they won't have as many presents and it won't be such chaos. But because we have a three year old and a five year old, it's a bit mad, isn't it? So, we just keep control as much as we can, slow it down, bah humbug! I think it's extending out the event, I think. Otherwise it's all done and dusted before you've even put your clothes on. Yeah. But a Christmas for us, I think it's very important that we just make sure that we don't work at all, because it's easy being self-employed entrepreneurs to think about work all the time. And so for us, Christmas Day is very much a break from that and really just having our heads and our souls in the house with the children, just enjoying our family. It's nice to have one day off, right? It's nice to have one day off a year. We do try and make an effort. Anyway, on that note, thank you very much for having this little discussion with me. There were lots of little nuggets and words there that I'm sure the listeners will find useful. And we need to go and book our Christmas pantomime, because that's a tradition I want us to have every year. We need to book our visit to Santa. That's another Christmas tradition. Have you not done that yet? No. Oh. And we need to put up the tree. We've got to get the tree up before the 1st of December and we're recording this on the 28th of November. So, we don't have much time. So you better go and get in the attic. I'll go and get my shoes on. Okay. Thanks Nick. And thank you to you for listening. Until next time, take very good care and goodbye.