Charity shopping for Christmas

I’m a bit bah humbug when it comes to Christmas and think all mention of it should be banned until December at the earliest. However, now I have children I do realise the necessity of starting Christmas shopping early. And where do you think I do my Christmas shopping, yes, you’ve got it. So now our summer holidays include a trip round the charity shops of where we’re staying in search of stocking fillers. Fortunately, my husband likes this too, in fact it’s usually his idea, the only trouble we have is distracting the boys while we buy things or count jigsaw pieces to check they’re all there.

 Last year “Father Christmas” picked up presents in Shropshire, Suffolk and Devon, but come December we realised that we were short of things for our younger son. We always struggle with him as we’ve two boys so we already have a lot of the stuff that he’d like. But he had a settling in day at playgroup so I took advantage of this to hit the charity shops of St Neots. Unfortunately, everyone else must have had the same idea and I came back empty handed. Now, I know that any normal person would think - “well, that wasn’t a success, better try shopping in real shops”, but you know me well enough by now…. So, yes, I decided not to change the type of shop but the venue and we went on a family outing to St Ives. (Cambridgeshire not Cornwall in case you were thinking I’d really lost the plot.) The charity shops in St Ives were very fine indeed and we finished our Christmas shopping in a couple of hours, one of us distracting the children while the other surreptitiously took our finds to the till . We found Kiddie K’nex, brand new cuddly toys of the squirrel from Ice Age and a book of Henry’s favourite obscure telly character, Franklin the turtle. So I was happy, as were the boys when they opened their stockings. In fact, Henry loved the squirrel so much that he wasn’t that interested in opening the rest of his presents.

So now you have a glimpse into my charity shop obsessed family life. No festival is complete without charity shopping! Please don’t tell the boys though, as far as they know, their presents were lovingly made at the North Pole by elves.

Sophie x