Learner Dad: I think we impose Christmas on our kids

Sometimes I think we impose Christmas on our kids. A couple of weeks back, my wife and I were all about The Late Late Toy Show and going to see Jack and The Beanstalk in the Everyman Theatre.

Our kids had two questions — how much chocolate will we be allowed to eat during the Late Late Toy Show, and will we be able to get over-priced plastic swords at the panto, like last year? We were basically imposing our childhood Christmas on them, sweetening the pill with treats and toys.

It felt like we were giving them an old school, analogue, two-channel land, playing board games by the fire kind of thing, when they just wanted to eat chocolate, watch Netflix and speak with American accents.

And then they found the Lego in my mother’s house. It’s a thing now when we visit my mother’s place — she fills me in on the latest ailments of the people on her road (I’m not looking forward to getting old), while the kids head upstairs and rummage through my old toys.

It was nice getting back in touch with KerPlunk, Whatchamacallit and Checkers, and there’s plenty of laughs to he had at the state of the kids on the box. (The late ’70s was a dark time for hairdos.)

Anyway, last week, they came down with an ancient Dunnes Stores bag (one of the green ones) full of my old Lego.

It was incredible — they built a space station, complete with heroes and super-villains, in a half-hour frenzy of imagination.

They have Lego at home as well, but I think the surprise of finding out I had it too sparked something extra in their expanding minds.

I could see my mother was spellbound by the nostalgia of it all, rolling back the years to when we were still at home, loving that some things never change.

And they don’t, particularly at Christmas time. We were going to keep the kids up to watch the start of the Late Late Toy Show, but ended up bribing them with Roses for breakfast the next day if they went to bed early, because we had opened a bottle of prosecco and wanted to watch The Crown on Netflix. (Don’t judge us, it had been a long week.)

They got up early the next morning to a recording of the toy show. Our seven-year-old watched every second of it, munching away on her Roses and asking me to get tickets for next year.

Our five-year-old gave up after 10 minutes because, like a lot of adults, he doesn’t like watching other people’s kids singing and dancing.

But he surprised us at the pantomime the following night. He’s not a great fan of cinemas and theatres — the clamour kind of wrecks his head.

The prosecco the night before had wrecked our heads a bit, so we weren’t looking forward to his reaction when the lights went down and noise came up.

Again, it felt like imposing a Christmas tradition on him.

We bought him the over-priced plastic sword and a packet of Munchies and hoped for the best. And then a strange thing happened — he really enjoyed it.

By the time we got to the ‘embarrass the adults dance’, he was up in my arms, shaking his ass.

He sat in my lap at the end, as the pantomime dame stepped out of character and read shout-outs to various groups of kids in the audience.

The scouts from Kilbehenny and beavers from Fermoy roared back as their names were called out, and I was spellbound, like my mother, at the nostalgia of it all.

I squeezed my son a little tighter, my wife did the same to our daughter, and it felt a lot like Christmas in the stalls of the Everyman.

Yes, it’s nice to pig out on chocolates and prosecco at this time of year. But doing the same things you always did with your family is also a great way to remind yourself of your place in the scheme of things.

If my kids have kids, I hope they impose Christmas on them as well.