“Your toddler pulls the balls out of the tree while you burn the confit de canard”

Image: Getty Images

Thought you knew what Christmas stress was before you had kids? Ha-ha. Preparing a Christmas dinner with a screaming toddler on your leg, while your toddler wraps around the Christmas tree and you burn the confit de canard in the meantime. With children you only know what real Christmas worries are. These six Christmas things will never be the same again.

The perfect Christmas tree

Obstacle 1: setting up the Christmas tree. Nice and quiet with Mariah Carey in the background decorating the Christmas tree is a thing of the past. Now you are short of hands to ensure that that expensive Christmas ball does not clatter to the floor in 1000 pieces and if you look the other way you will find half the toy basket in the Christmas tree. With a bit of luck, your offspring will also want to give all the glittering school crafts a place of honor, at eye level. Yes, you can also write that feng shui Christmas tree on your stomach this year.

Gift time

Just when you plop down satisfied on the couch and think you’re almost done with all the preparations, the stress spots shoot up your neck… Panic! In all the hustle and bustle you forgot the gifts! And so on the very last shopping evening before Christmas – just like half of the Netherlands – you run like a headless chicken through the shopping street for last-minute panic purchases. And do you think back to the old days, when you would roam the shopping streets weeks in advance looking for the perfect gift.

Also read: ‘I’m anti-Christmas, but my son loves it’

What are we eating?

Scallops with saffron sauce, oysters with samphire or grilled lobster tail with garlic butter? Before you had children you put on the table what you liked yourself. Now you have to take all wishes into account, especially what they don’t like. With a bit of bad luck you are dipping another piece of dry baguette in the cheese fondue. You can’t wait to join your children for Christmas dinner in a few years. And don’t let mom like anything anymore…

Party dress or sweatpants

It seems like the law of the Christmas outfit: if you want your children to look nice, you have to sacrifice at least your own outfit for it. No more spending hours, trying make-ups and outfit combinations, but in total stress looking for that one pair of tights without a ladder and that party dress that suddenly seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. And do you think you’re being smart and don’t exchange your clothes for your party outfit until five minutes before the visitors arrive? There is a good chance that a blob of spit will land on your shoulder, just as the bell rings…

Christmas is for rest, right?

Sleeping in endlessly is a thing of the distant past. Just like a romantic breakfast in bed. Don’t give in and still want to have breakfast in bed with the whole family? Then you run the risk that you will find rusk crumbs and blobs of jam under, behind, next to and in your bed weeks later. But it is fun!

The hangover comes (not) later

Cheers! It used to be easy to slurp down wine after wine during Christmas. That still seems like a good idea, except that after two wines you already have a big hangover the next day. And even if your sweet Christmas angels are in it a lot later, they are guaranteed to be bouncing next to your bed at 7 o’clock in the morning. The hangover does not come later, but accompanies you all day (or two). Is it because of the children or because you are getting older? Let’s keep the answer in the middle.

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