Will the school close early?

I have taken Little Miss to school but it is snowing again and we don't know if it will stay open all day. This doesn't bode well for a trip to North Wales but we have two weeks for it to improve. On the other hand I am about to cancel a meeting booked for tomorrow night. I really don't want to go out in the dark and cold if I don't have to and the family history society is not high on the priority list for life support. Most of the members are my age or even older so I don't need them to fall and hurt themselves while trying to attend a meeting that really isn't necessary.

I put the wreath onto the front door last night and then stood out in the freezing wind to take a picture. Mr M set up the newest Christmas gadget, a Santa that climbs up and down his ladder with a string of very large lights - well they are if you judge their size by how tall the Santa is. It has the sleigh at the bottom of the ladder, I didn't get it into this picture, and it plays Christmas tunes. For the reader old enough to remember them it sounds like the tunes were played on a Bon Tempi keyboard and it has a wonderfully nostalgic sound, awful but fascinating. The little motors that move Santa whine slightly so we have fa la la la la la la la, whine, clunk. The clunk being Santa's boot on the ladder.

We sat, entranced, the TV forgotten as he climbed up and down the ladder. This morning Little Miss arrived all wrapped up for school and as she stood at the window to wave bye bye to mummy I flicked the switch. "Ooh, grandma, it's snow...... ooooooh, what's that? it's Santa, why is he climbing the ladder? whose lights are they? Has Grandpa seen that? He'll like that won't he Grandma? he loves things like that. Ooooh he's going back up! Did Mummy see it?"

And that's what Christmas is all about, wonder and magic and memories. My father, G*d rest his soul, told me something when my daughter was born 45 years ago. He said this;

"You have to make memories, they don't just happen. You have to keep on remembering them so that they are never forgotten."

The climbing Santa will be here for a while and Little Miss will look back to when she was five and it was snowing at the beginning of December and she'll remember the excitement she felt and want to recapture that moment - perhaps she will copy her Grandma and Journal her Christmas too.