Tonight when she went to bed, Kaitlyn was careful to leave out a plate of cookies for Santa (we’d bought some heart-shaped butter cookies at the store in town today). She also left him a big glass of milk and some water for the reindeer and elves to share. In between those two glasses was her orange soda. She looked at her arrangement, then picked up her soda and moved it by her bed, saying she doesn’t want Santa to take hers by mistake.
Bill set up the tripod for his camera with my furry hat on it and we called that our Christmas tree. Kaitlyn thought it was great.
Before dinner, she’d invited her little friends Tess and Zoey over to watch the Grinch before bed. But once dinner ended, it became clear that Kaitlyn was far too tired to play hostess. So I canceled her plans and put her to bed. I agreed to lay down with her and turn on the tv. I figured television in German couldn’t be that interesting and she’d fall asleep soon enough. We started with a show about fish. There was no narration, just music, so it didn’t matter what country we were in. But before long it switched from cute fish to mean, horrible fish with giant teeth and ugly faces chomping on other, smaller, helpless fish. Kaitlyn started to cry, so I changed the channel. Next up was ice skating. The occasional commentary seemed to be in Italian, but, like with the fish, no words were really necessary anyway. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an ice skating show quite like this one: the skaters performed to live music. And the director apparently had never seen anything like it either… he kept switching from the skater to a wide shot so wide you could barely see the skater (granted, I didn’t have on my glasses anymore) to a close up of the singer when the skater well may have been flipping or spinning or doing something more interesting than singing. Kaitlyn found it boring enough to fall asleep. So much for her big plan on waiting up for Santa.