Where was I? Ah yes. Lost and alone on a sea of unembarrassed enthusiasm, without the raft of irony to cling onto... Doesn't sound good - I'd better not leave me there too long.
When one is shipwrecked, one has to make use of the scarce resources to hand, and thus it was that I began to investigate enthusiasm, to see if I could put it to any useful purpose. I noticed that my children came home from school with teachers’ comments reading “woo-hoo, 10-yo, this is AWESOME work!”, or “6-yo, I am so PROUD of how hard you tried on this - way to go!”, and seeing their faces light up with pride. I began to wonder how they would cope with a return to the “good effort” or “nice work” crumbs that they would be thrown by British teachers.
Then I noticed that even adults dealing with adults feel able to say things about themselves and each other that are affirming and positive and, well, rather, um, uncomfortable and embarrassing and, let’s face it, jolly unBritish. Then after a while, since you can get used to pretty much anything, I began to feel that this is actually quite nice (in a reserved kind of repressed way). The zenith came when I got together with 3 other women to form a book club. We had a great evening, partly discussing the book, mostly discussing life, and the next morning, there was a little flurry of emailing. It was effusive. There were superlatives. I was told I was “adorable”. Email, of course, is very forgiving, and in the privacy of my own home, I was able to shuffle about in my chair, look at the ceiling, breathe deeply and recite the words of God save the Queen to restore my equilibrium. I wrote a reply, matching their effusive excitement: “Thanks so much for your emails. It wasn’t a bad evening at all, was it?”
Maybe I’ve just been here too long, but you know, I can’t help feeling that the Americans might have got hold of something. I wonder what it is like in the other direction. How on earth does it feel to an American moving to England? Dour, cynical, repressed, gloomy? To them I say, you should try living in Scotland. No, no, I'm only joking.
You see, here in Home on the Range, there's a line that goes 'seldom is heard a discouraging word'. You get to Britain, and it's the brutal opposite. The newspapers are discouraging, the discussion in the office is discouraging, the chat at the school gate is discouraging. We don’t see it like that. We see it as self-consciously amusing, wittily detached. We think Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Ross, Private Eye. We look on the Americans as a nation of adults who’ve never quite grown out of childhood, but I’m beginning to wonder if the British are a nation of adults who haven’t entirely left their teenage years behind. We’re so keen (in a totally uninterested way, of course) to be cool, to be unimpressed. Perhaps it’s not as clever as we think.
I find myself in the uncomfortable position of sitting on the fence with a foot in each camp. Fundamentally I am a Brit. My Brit foot is a size 6, and it’s a laconic foot in a painfully elegant cashmere sock, draped languidly over the fence in a self-deprecating gesture, an ironic reference to post-modernist foothood.
But my Yank foot, a size 8½, is learning to wiggle its toes in an unembarrassed manner. I dread to look, as I think it might be clad in one of those socks with individual toes, in bright stripes or spots. It might even be in team colours. It's enjoying itself, and it isn't going to apologise for that. It's pursuing happiness, and that's its right. Nothing to be ashamed of there. I’ve just thought of something else. Oh no. It probably understands the offside rule, and if not held in check, will soon start offering to explain it to other feet.
Hm. Time to do the patent Iota litmus test of enthusiasm. Close my eyes, picture an old friend of mine who used to render a roomful of the rest of us helpless with laughter by his description of an 'enthyoosiast'. Re-run in my memory that perfectly honed timing and pronounciation. Yup. Still has me rolling around in my imaginary seat. Phew. Still on the right side of the fence then. That’s a relief. Though nothing to get too excited about, of course.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Enthusiasm: Part I
Enthusiasm. I’ve thought a lot about enthusiasm over the past year. That’s because there’s a lot of it about over here. Americans are so unembarrassed about it, and you know what? I’ve come to admire that. I know, I know, it’s all very unBritish, and don’t think I can’t see you, over the Atlantic, wincing a little and gripping your shoulder blades together, and thinking “oh Iota, no, please not”.
It’s not cool, is it? Enthusiasm. It means celebrating your kids’ achievements publicly (dreadful), or being proud of what and who you are (ghastly), or telling people all about your favourite occupation and why you enjoy it (anorak). I have to say, however, that having experienced rather more of it in the past year than I am used to, I can see it does have a lot of upside.
My study of the enthusiasm phenomenon started when I went to 10-yo’s first soccer match of the season. I was horrified. All those parents cheering the team on, and seeming to mind very much how they did. I mean really mind. Not just showing up and being supportive in a generally parental way. I mean running up and down the sidelines and shouting encouragement. I guess this happens in Britain too. We hadn’t quite reached that stage before we left, so I asked my brother in Sussex, who has soccer-playing children. He said “yes, I’m afraid people do get rather keen, but just shout “go deep” every now and again, and you’ll be fine”. Yet in spite of his advice and this evidence of the existence of enthusiasm on the south coast of England, I couldn’t help feeling that somehow this unapologetic eagerness and commitment was something of a different animal in America.
I tested out another mum, by making a conspiratorial comment about not understanding the offside rule. Now, women do not understand the offside rule. That is just how it is, as any self-respecting member of the sex will tell you. They are not biologically designed to. It’s to do with hunting and gathering, or staying in the cave, and superior non-understanding DNA being passed into the gene pool. It’s been scientifically proved. So imagine my horror when the other mum said “oh don’t worry, you just have to see it in operation a few times, and then you’ll get it, but actually FIFA have just brought in a new ruling which has nuanced it a little”. Now that really wasn’t cricket at all. Here I was, having left family and home to start a new chapter in another continent, and I couldn’t even make a connection using the most fundamental of womanly bonds. I diagnosed a case of over-enthusiasm, but worse was to come.
There was another mother there who said she had been at the soccer field on Saturday AND Sunday. When I joked about “beyond the call of duty”, she said, straight-faced, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world”. That was the moment I realized I was adrift. Lost and alone on a sea of unembarrassed enthusiasm, without the raft of irony to cling onto. That was a bad moment.
To be continued…
It’s not cool, is it? Enthusiasm. It means celebrating your kids’ achievements publicly (dreadful), or being proud of what and who you are (ghastly), or telling people all about your favourite occupation and why you enjoy it (anorak). I have to say, however, that having experienced rather more of it in the past year than I am used to, I can see it does have a lot of upside.
My study of the enthusiasm phenomenon started when I went to 10-yo’s first soccer match of the season. I was horrified. All those parents cheering the team on, and seeming to mind very much how they did. I mean really mind. Not just showing up and being supportive in a generally parental way. I mean running up and down the sidelines and shouting encouragement. I guess this happens in Britain too. We hadn’t quite reached that stage before we left, so I asked my brother in Sussex, who has soccer-playing children. He said “yes, I’m afraid people do get rather keen, but just shout “go deep” every now and again, and you’ll be fine”. Yet in spite of his advice and this evidence of the existence of enthusiasm on the south coast of England, I couldn’t help feeling that somehow this unapologetic eagerness and commitment was something of a different animal in America.
I tested out another mum, by making a conspiratorial comment about not understanding the offside rule. Now, women do not understand the offside rule. That is just how it is, as any self-respecting member of the sex will tell you. They are not biologically designed to. It’s to do with hunting and gathering, or staying in the cave, and superior non-understanding DNA being passed into the gene pool. It’s been scientifically proved. So imagine my horror when the other mum said “oh don’t worry, you just have to see it in operation a few times, and then you’ll get it, but actually FIFA have just brought in a new ruling which has nuanced it a little”. Now that really wasn’t cricket at all. Here I was, having left family and home to start a new chapter in another continent, and I couldn’t even make a connection using the most fundamental of womanly bonds. I diagnosed a case of over-enthusiasm, but worse was to come.
There was another mother there who said she had been at the soccer field on Saturday AND Sunday. When I joked about “beyond the call of duty”, she said, straight-faced, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world”. That was the moment I realized I was adrift. Lost and alone on a sea of unembarrassed enthusiasm, without the raft of irony to cling onto. That was a bad moment.
To be continued…
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Top tips for a crafty Christmas
I might have been a preschool teacher in another life. Trouble is, it involves too many preschoolers in close proximity for too many hours of the day, and these days, too much filling in of forms and assessing which child has mastered which skill and when. Don’t get me started. But the little hint that gives me away is this: I love pottering about doing crafty-type things with small children. Actually, I love doing them without small children, but I didn’t know that until I had small children. Now I have small children, they are the props which make it possible for me to fiddle around with cotton wool, foam shapes and glue, without feeling silly. Of course now I’m in America, I could take up scrapbooking, which would probably fill the need, nurture the talent, help me express whatever creativity lurks behind the enjoyment of glue, shapes, googly eyes and pom-poms, but I can’t quite see the point of scrapbooking (sorry, all you dedicated scrapbookers out there), and I do have at least a few years left of small children before I have to turn my pottering about into something more credible. Maybe by then the phase will have passed.
Now don’t build me up into some kind of craft supermum here (I know you were about to…) I don’t hover round the kitchen table, sticky backed plastic in hand and clever ideas from the internet in head. My house isn’t filled with cute and kitsch home-made items that are both attractive and useful. It’s not a frequently-indulged pleasure, and when it is indulged, the result is some mournful object that hangs around on the side somewhere, until I judge that no-one except me will notice or be sad if it transferred to the trash.
Christmas is the perfect opportunity to indulge myself. I have a couple of books of beautiful craft projects for the season, so I flick through those. I always get put off by the words 'oven baked clay' though. Do people really know how to handle oven baked clay? I don’t. Sounds difficult. No. Trust me. There are only two things you need for Christmas crafts. Glitter and enthusiasm. That’s it. Simple, you see. Glitter and enthusiasm.
The glitter is easy. These days you can buy it in glue, which means it’s less messy. That, in my opinion, defeats half the purpose. I like the old stuff, in tubes, which you sprinkle daintily over your glue patterns, until the lid insert falls out and the whole tube empties in a great pile. You won’t be vacuuming glitter out of your carpet till September if you use the glitter glue, which would mean you missed half the fun. For me, glitter and sparkle has always been inseparably part of Christmas, but having a daughter has been a challenge to that. The inevitable pink that invades one’s life – the hospital pretty much delivers it along with the baby - is all too often accompanied by sparkle. ‘Pink and sparkly’ have become a classic duo, similar to ‘warm and cosy’, ‘hale and hearty’, ‘safe and sound’, ‘gin and tonic’. I’m not sure what you can do about that, really, except just use ever more copious amounts of glitter at Christmas time, and add it to the list of parental ‘when I was a child’ laments, along with out of season strawberries and having to eat up your food even if you didn’t like it.
You have to dig a bit deeper for the enthusiasm, but we all have a little Joyce Grenfell in us somewhere. You just need to brush up a bit of vocabulary. In America, this is easy, because (as well as the trusty ‘good jahb’), you can use ‘ahsome’ for every eventuality. For emphasis, you can say ‘totally ahsome’, but usually just good old ‘ahsome’ will do, especially if you add a bit of extra ‘aah’ to it. In England, we say ‘spiffing’ a lot at this time of year, supported by ‘splendid’ and ‘top notch’ (British readers, what ho, back me up on this one).
The other failsafe enthusiasm-generator is the Christmas CD. I’m not talking carols from King’s College Cambridge, or pop classics by the original artists. I’m talking Jingle Bell Rock or Fifty Festive Favourites. It’ll have unadventurous bass lines and a relentlessly annoying drum beat, it’ll have children singing out of tune and twee breathy whispered Christmas greetings, it’ll contain irritating mistakes (ours has “deck the halls with bows of holly”), but you know you’ll love it deep down.
The rest is easy. You just cut out shapes, and put lots of glitter on them. You can do snowflakes (white paper, easy), or reindeer (brown paper, might need a bit of advance shopping, or rummaging through the trash for an old brown envelope), or Santa (red paper, cotton wool), or a stocking (come now, even the most creatively challenged of us can cut out a stocking shape). See, it’s easy. You just have to remember that this is not an occasion when less is more. More glitter is more.
The final stage is to put up the decorations. Now there are some people whose artistic sensibilities may be offended at this point. If your house looks like something out of Country Living magazine, you may want to debate this suggestion, but come on, it’s only 12 days, and what are you afraid of? Even if the neighbours come round, what are they doing to say? At best, nothing, and at worst something along the lines of “oh, these are very… um… festive, aren’t they?” You may even enjoy watching them pause and struggle for the right word (should have thought the whole sentence out before beginning it). No-one is going to remark “your children don’t have very good fine motor skills do they?” or “what a pity your creative urges weren’t adequately satisfied by three experiences of childbirth”. You have nothing to fear in polite society, and you will make your children happy. What more could you want?
Now don’t build me up into some kind of craft supermum here (I know you were about to…) I don’t hover round the kitchen table, sticky backed plastic in hand and clever ideas from the internet in head. My house isn’t filled with cute and kitsch home-made items that are both attractive and useful. It’s not a frequently-indulged pleasure, and when it is indulged, the result is some mournful object that hangs around on the side somewhere, until I judge that no-one except me will notice or be sad if it transferred to the trash.
Christmas is the perfect opportunity to indulge myself. I have a couple of books of beautiful craft projects for the season, so I flick through those. I always get put off by the words 'oven baked clay' though. Do people really know how to handle oven baked clay? I don’t. Sounds difficult. No. Trust me. There are only two things you need for Christmas crafts. Glitter and enthusiasm. That’s it. Simple, you see. Glitter and enthusiasm.
The glitter is easy. These days you can buy it in glue, which means it’s less messy. That, in my opinion, defeats half the purpose. I like the old stuff, in tubes, which you sprinkle daintily over your glue patterns, until the lid insert falls out and the whole tube empties in a great pile. You won’t be vacuuming glitter out of your carpet till September if you use the glitter glue, which would mean you missed half the fun. For me, glitter and sparkle has always been inseparably part of Christmas, but having a daughter has been a challenge to that. The inevitable pink that invades one’s life – the hospital pretty much delivers it along with the baby - is all too often accompanied by sparkle. ‘Pink and sparkly’ have become a classic duo, similar to ‘warm and cosy’, ‘hale and hearty’, ‘safe and sound’, ‘gin and tonic’. I’m not sure what you can do about that, really, except just use ever more copious amounts of glitter at Christmas time, and add it to the list of parental ‘when I was a child’ laments, along with out of season strawberries and having to eat up your food even if you didn’t like it.
You have to dig a bit deeper for the enthusiasm, but we all have a little Joyce Grenfell in us somewhere. You just need to brush up a bit of vocabulary. In America, this is easy, because (as well as the trusty ‘good jahb’), you can use ‘ahsome’ for every eventuality. For emphasis, you can say ‘totally ahsome’, but usually just good old ‘ahsome’ will do, especially if you add a bit of extra ‘aah’ to it. In England, we say ‘spiffing’ a lot at this time of year, supported by ‘splendid’ and ‘top notch’ (British readers, what ho, back me up on this one).
The other failsafe enthusiasm-generator is the Christmas CD. I’m not talking carols from King’s College Cambridge, or pop classics by the original artists. I’m talking Jingle Bell Rock or Fifty Festive Favourites. It’ll have unadventurous bass lines and a relentlessly annoying drum beat, it’ll have children singing out of tune and twee breathy whispered Christmas greetings, it’ll contain irritating mistakes (ours has “deck the halls with bows of holly”), but you know you’ll love it deep down.
The rest is easy. You just cut out shapes, and put lots of glitter on them. You can do snowflakes (white paper, easy), or reindeer (brown paper, might need a bit of advance shopping, or rummaging through the trash for an old brown envelope), or Santa (red paper, cotton wool), or a stocking (come now, even the most creatively challenged of us can cut out a stocking shape). See, it’s easy. You just have to remember that this is not an occasion when less is more. More glitter is more.
The final stage is to put up the decorations. Now there are some people whose artistic sensibilities may be offended at this point. If your house looks like something out of Country Living magazine, you may want to debate this suggestion, but come on, it’s only 12 days, and what are you afraid of? Even if the neighbours come round, what are they doing to say? At best, nothing, and at worst something along the lines of “oh, these are very… um… festive, aren’t they?” You may even enjoy watching them pause and struggle for the right word (should have thought the whole sentence out before beginning it). No-one is going to remark “your children don’t have very good fine motor skills do they?” or “what a pity your creative urges weren’t adequately satisfied by three experiences of childbirth”. You have nothing to fear in polite society, and you will make your children happy. What more could you want?
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Not wrong, just different: Christmas Special
It was the suggestion in the comments box, coming on the same day as that most bloggable of events, the school Christmas concert, which did it. That, and having a sister who sits and enjoys watching 'Barbie as Rapunzel' with 3-yo. Yes, I really did say “enjoys watching”, so don’t waste time flicking your eyes back over that sentence in disbelief. Come with me, instead, as I emerge from my self-imposed blogging silence, and take you to my boys’ Christmas evening concert.
To enjoy this story to its full, you have to know that in corners of the blogosphere, there has been much head-scratching and brow-furrowing amongst those involved in school Christmas concerts over possible rhymes for the name ‘Mary’. I believe it was even suggested resituating the Christmas story in the Republic of Ireland at one point, simply to make the following a possibility:
Lo on yonder donkey, here comes Mary,
(cue for solo line by small girl in blue costume)
“It’s a long way to Tipperary”.
There was also an attempt to adapt the favourite old Scottish ballad 'Auntie Mary kept a canary', but it’s too profane to repeat here.
Anyway, as it turned out, here in the heart of the mid-American plains, the answer was sitting on my doorstep, in the form of my sons’ music teacher, Mr Darey: music teacher and Christmas show impresario. By now, my rhyming-with-Mary skills are so finely honed that I could have produced a whole ballad featuring Mr Darey and the entire lower school, beginning:
Here comes Mary, riding on a donkey,
Watch Mr Darey, then the singing won't go wonky.
Sadly, though, this was not to be. First, the anonymity of the blog means that my rhyming-with-Mary skills are not known locally. Second, and perhaps this is the more significant reason, the festive season is so PR-conscious, that carols and nativities are done away with altogether, and so the school show was all about snow, reindeer, rocking round the tree, and chipmunks. This is one of those culturally puzzling things. Here I am, slap in the middle of the Bible Belt, somewhere between Ezekiel and Zephaniah I should think, and all year round, it is totally acceptable - in a way that it no longer is in Britain - to talk about Christianity, practice Christianity, assume Christianity is a common local currency. Till Christmas. Then people carefully wish you “Happy Holidays”, put up holiday trees, bake festive cookies, purchase seasonal items, focus unwaveringly on Santa as the hero of the piece, and avoid any nasty religious reference altogether - just at the point of the year when in Britain, the Christian story is allowed to peep through the liberal tolerant curtain.
Anyway, back to the show. It was the very best evening I’ve spent here, and I’ve lived here over a year, so that’s saying something (perhaps it says I should get out more of an evening). For the first quarter of an hour, every minute was a blog post moment. The Christmas tree was knocked over by the curtains, the microphones squealed with feedback, the opening number went horribly wrong because no-one had worked out how long it takes 240 children to get onto a stage - or indeed whether 240 children could fit on this particular stage. There were children wobbling precariously on benches, and instructions hissed at them from the wings. There was talk of how old and historic the building was (built in 1907) which had me and Husband giggling smugly into our hands. We were told there would be no drinks in the interval because the venue had specified that they had just had a new carpet fitted and didn't want anything spilt on it (do they not know what a few chocolate chip cookies can do to a carpet under the feet of 240 children and accompanying families?)
The best thing though, by far, was Mr Darey himself. He was, Husband and I agreed, an amalgamation of Morecambe and Wise. He played both the straight guy and the funny guy. He fed himself lines, then played up to them. He looked like Morecambe, but with Wise's height. By the end of the evening, every time he had to do the fill-in bit between numbers (which took ages because the venue was huge and the school hadn't been able to rehearse in it, so there were times when whole classes went missing), Husband and I would murmur to each other "that was very Morecambe" or "that was just so Wise". I was fully expecting him at any moment to do that wiggling up and down thing with his glasses. He demonstrated two different ties that played Jingle Bells. He kept telling us how wonderful our kids are (this is a fail-safe with parents isn't it?) and how much fun rehearsals had been. The duet he performed with his wife, more 'White Christmas' than ‘Bring Me Sunshine’, was a fine number, but I must confess it did provide the one big disappointment of the evening. I’d so hoped she’d be called Mary, but she was Geraldine. Such a wasted opportunity.
There were lots of clever twists, like the fifth grade singing Jingle Bells, and then suddenly shifting up a gear and doing it in the style of Elvis, ending with a cheery “ho, ho, ho y’all”. There was the second grade hijacking the fourth grade’s number, but, guess what, the two songs blended perfectly to make a rousing duet. There were the first graders dressing up as presents, promising to mail themselves to their fondly-watching parents. There were a couple of numbers by members of staff, which I thought was pretty sporting of them. There was a grand finale, worthy of Morecambe and Wise, with everyone on stage and Angela Rippon doing the can-can.
So that kicked our Christmas off to a flying start. Now I’m merrily a-blogging again (just for the season, you understand), watch out for Iota’s Crafty Christmas Tips, and a guest blog from my mother and/or sister. Unless the Beeb is running old Morecambe and Wise Christmas Specials, in which case you’ll be too busy watching those to be reading blogs.
Happy Christmas to you all. And I was fibbing about Angela Rippon, by the way. Sorry.
To enjoy this story to its full, you have to know that in corners of the blogosphere, there has been much head-scratching and brow-furrowing amongst those involved in school Christmas concerts over possible rhymes for the name ‘Mary’. I believe it was even suggested resituating the Christmas story in the Republic of Ireland at one point, simply to make the following a possibility:
Lo on yonder donkey, here comes Mary,
(cue for solo line by small girl in blue costume)
“It’s a long way to Tipperary”.
There was also an attempt to adapt the favourite old Scottish ballad 'Auntie Mary kept a canary', but it’s too profane to repeat here.
Anyway, as it turned out, here in the heart of the mid-American plains, the answer was sitting on my doorstep, in the form of my sons’ music teacher, Mr Darey: music teacher and Christmas show impresario. By now, my rhyming-with-Mary skills are so finely honed that I could have produced a whole ballad featuring Mr Darey and the entire lower school, beginning:
Here comes Mary, riding on a donkey,
Watch Mr Darey, then the singing won't go wonky.
Sadly, though, this was not to be. First, the anonymity of the blog means that my rhyming-with-Mary skills are not known locally. Second, and perhaps this is the more significant reason, the festive season is so PR-conscious, that carols and nativities are done away with altogether, and so the school show was all about snow, reindeer, rocking round the tree, and chipmunks. This is one of those culturally puzzling things. Here I am, slap in the middle of the Bible Belt, somewhere between Ezekiel and Zephaniah I should think, and all year round, it is totally acceptable - in a way that it no longer is in Britain - to talk about Christianity, practice Christianity, assume Christianity is a common local currency. Till Christmas. Then people carefully wish you “Happy Holidays”, put up holiday trees, bake festive cookies, purchase seasonal items, focus unwaveringly on Santa as the hero of the piece, and avoid any nasty religious reference altogether - just at the point of the year when in Britain, the Christian story is allowed to peep through the liberal tolerant curtain.
Anyway, back to the show. It was the very best evening I’ve spent here, and I’ve lived here over a year, so that’s saying something (perhaps it says I should get out more of an evening). For the first quarter of an hour, every minute was a blog post moment. The Christmas tree was knocked over by the curtains, the microphones squealed with feedback, the opening number went horribly wrong because no-one had worked out how long it takes 240 children to get onto a stage - or indeed whether 240 children could fit on this particular stage. There were children wobbling precariously on benches, and instructions hissed at them from the wings. There was talk of how old and historic the building was (built in 1907) which had me and Husband giggling smugly into our hands. We were told there would be no drinks in the interval because the venue had specified that they had just had a new carpet fitted and didn't want anything spilt on it (do they not know what a few chocolate chip cookies can do to a carpet under the feet of 240 children and accompanying families?)
The best thing though, by far, was Mr Darey himself. He was, Husband and I agreed, an amalgamation of Morecambe and Wise. He played both the straight guy and the funny guy. He fed himself lines, then played up to them. He looked like Morecambe, but with Wise's height. By the end of the evening, every time he had to do the fill-in bit between numbers (which took ages because the venue was huge and the school hadn't been able to rehearse in it, so there were times when whole classes went missing), Husband and I would murmur to each other "that was very Morecambe" or "that was just so Wise". I was fully expecting him at any moment to do that wiggling up and down thing with his glasses. He demonstrated two different ties that played Jingle Bells. He kept telling us how wonderful our kids are (this is a fail-safe with parents isn't it?) and how much fun rehearsals had been. The duet he performed with his wife, more 'White Christmas' than ‘Bring Me Sunshine’, was a fine number, but I must confess it did provide the one big disappointment of the evening. I’d so hoped she’d be called Mary, but she was Geraldine. Such a wasted opportunity.
There were lots of clever twists, like the fifth grade singing Jingle Bells, and then suddenly shifting up a gear and doing it in the style of Elvis, ending with a cheery “ho, ho, ho y’all”. There was the second grade hijacking the fourth grade’s number, but, guess what, the two songs blended perfectly to make a rousing duet. There were the first graders dressing up as presents, promising to mail themselves to their fondly-watching parents. There were a couple of numbers by members of staff, which I thought was pretty sporting of them. There was a grand finale, worthy of Morecambe and Wise, with everyone on stage and Angela Rippon doing the can-can.
So that kicked our Christmas off to a flying start. Now I’m merrily a-blogging again (just for the season, you understand), watch out for Iota’s Crafty Christmas Tips, and a guest blog from my mother and/or sister. Unless the Beeb is running old Morecambe and Wise Christmas Specials, in which case you’ll be too busy watching those to be reading blogs.
Happy Christmas to you all. And I was fibbing about Angela Rippon, by the way. Sorry.
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