I am a bad person.  I have done a bad thing.

I almost finished the last parts of my Christmas shopping at the weekend, but not before getting my head in a total tangle.  I have quite a few friends with children and I thought I’d been organised in my plan to buy one ‘group’ gift for each family a few months back, but for one reason or another those presents don’t seem quite right anymore.  So I needed to think of a little extra for all the kids to go with the family gift, but frankly, I don’t know what to buy for children of varying ages and sexes.  The only thing I could think of that all smaller people like is sweets.  But then I thought their parents wouldn’t thank me – more sugar to add to the adrenalin of Christmas.  But then I thought that’s what Christmas is about when you’re small.  And providing that sugar high is what single, childless cat ladies are for :o)

My plan became to make a little parcel of sweets for each child to make it slightly more interesting than a Selection Box (which I remember from my childhood always looked big, but once you unwrapped them they were slightly disappointing).  So I bought lots of sweets.

These sweets included a tin of Heroes and a tin of Celebrations.  I rarely buy either as I discovered a few years ago that I ended up eating about half the tin, realising I didn’t like the rest and donating them to various family members (along with any evil yellow sweets that may be floating around the house).  It’s cheaper just to buy a bar of chocolate.

I did intend on making up the packs as soon as I got home, but instead I started wrapping up presents  – I needed to get the family presents to my parents as bags and boxes were starting to overtake Pog Towers, and there wasn’t much room for me and Norman to actually move around.

Wrapping takes ages.  And I mean ages. And I am rubbish at it. I needed something to get me through, so I opened one of the boxes of sweets and just had a couple.

To cut a long story short, I have now eaten all the good ones. I have pretty much stolen sweets from children.  I am not proud.

But now I have two choices.  Do I just make packages out of what’s left (there’s more than just the two tins – I’ve hidden the rest from myself), and possibly stay slightly more popular with the parents? (Fewer sweets = shorter sugar high) Or do I buy another box at the weekend and risk repeating the whole process all over again?  I think it might have to be the second option.  And quality checking is slightly different to stealing, isn’t it? :o)

oops