We took the kids abroad for the second time in their lives this Christmas.
My wife saw a ‘mini-cruise’ advertised in the local paper, at just £99 per person, and we booked up. So that was their present, instead of loads of toys that would break on teh first day.
We boarded the cruise ship (well let’s be honest, it was a cross-channel ferry) on Christmas eve, sailed to France overnight. On Christmas morning it continued up the river Seine to Rouen there was a shuttle bus into the town centre, but everything was closed. The next day after sleeping in our cabins we had a coach trip to Paris which took us to all the major sites before releasing us near Opera. We took the kids on the metro to Sacre Couer, fed them crepes, and dodged the hoards trying to sell us trinkets and friendship breacelets before returning to the ship to sail home overnight.
The on-board entertainment was very good, with live bands, communal carol singing on Christmas day, and so on. My 7 year old boy became known as the one person who would always dance vigorously whatever the song.
The highlight for me was when the kids powers of persuasion overcame my cynicism and Santa-phobia, and we went to the room just in time for them to call out my children’s names, and each one of them was given a good quality age and gender appropriate toy. My Santa-phobia remains strong (He is a vague and misleading South European Christian myth mixed with a North European pagan winter god and coke advert who teaches a doctrine of salvation by works while rewarding the rich more than the poor and also frightening small children along the way, but my main objection is that he displaces Christ as the object of society's affection), but I felt that the tour operators had gone out of their way to give us a good time, and felt really pampered.
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