Daddy Diaries – Don’t Touch The Christmas Tree!

It's really a phrase that is wasted breath, if you want to know the truth: 'DON'T TOUCH THE CHRISTMAS TREE!'  When it comes to my two-and-a-half year old and my 19 month old, there's no chance they will listen, and less than 24 hours after the tree was assembled this year, the unthinkable...never mind, I should have seen this coming.

We had a good time including the kids in the process of putting the ornaments on the tree this year, but I had a feeling, we'd have very little chance keeping them from taking them off during the Christmas season.  I learned very quickly that any ornaments containing the likeness of Mickey Mouse or Snoopy would need to be hung up high on the tree.

As I've mentioned before, my wife likes to keep ornaments, and NEVER get rid of them.  That includes the 3 random candy canes that hang on the tree.  Not special candy canes, not fake candy canes, REAL wrapped candy canes from around 1986 or so.  Sadly (for my wife) two of the candy canes were broken by my daughter last year leaving only one survivor to go back up this Christmas.

Fast forward to Sunday evening, my wife and I are taking some clean clothes to the bed room and I hear an uncomfortable silence in the living room.  It is behind the tree I find my son with a plastic beaded candy cane in his mouth, with one bead already chewed off.  Next to him, it was the one he always shadows in every way, his big sister, munching through the plastic wrapper and taking bites out of the ancient candy cane.

"It's yucky," she says, trying to stomach the small pieces she has bitten off.

"No kidding," I say, "That is almost as old as your Mommy."

A couple of timeouts later, I can laugh about it, especially knowing that the three candy canes serving as ornaments have now gone away, but we will now spend the rest of the holiday season making sure no more ornaments wind up broken or digested.