The Christmas fair in my son’s school was, like all such things, unexpected. This is no one’s fault, but my own. I have a tendency to be – nay, an addiction to being – the last person to know about anything going on in his school. It is entirely my fault, you understand. There are leaflets and emails and reminders, it’s just that they never seem to sink in and leave me filling out zoo paperwork at 6am on the morning of ‘Adopt a Giraffe’ Day, or scrambling to cobble together a costume on Sunday night, before ‘Dress Like One of Those Chilean Miners That Got Trapped In 2010’ Week begins in earnest for another year.
It’s tempting to say that I was blindsided by this Christmas fair, but sadly, such a claim does not stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, I have been reminded of it several times by people in our school WhatsApp group and my son has also mentioned it several times more than once. Neither of these measures, however, can beat the one other timely reminder I’ve had that this occasion was round the corner; the placard I agreed to have placed outside my house advertising said event since early November. I have walked past this placard every time I’ve entered or exited my own home every single day since, without once internalising that it was an actual event that was actually happening. Today. At my son’s school. Directly across the street from my house.
I agreed because it’s good and right to support your school and because I always envisage myself – my future self – as the kind of person who is better at remembering such commitments than I am. The perfect, engaged parent the kind who is deeply connected to the things going on around him. For whom remembering Christmas fairs is just ‘something I do’.
Thankfully, I’m reminded just in time to raid our kitchen for coppers, since the event’s many attractions are decidedly cash-only. The spaceship-shaped piggy bank in our kitchen is duly pillaged and my son is delighted to be, once again, the main beneficiary of a generosity that only kicks in when I am driven to translate my guilt and shame into cold, hard cash.
In the end, the fair is a delightful occasion, with vast tables of donated books and toys available for knockdown prices and any manner of pizzas, cupcakes, cookies and sweets. My son acquires some pizza, an illustrated book about UFOs and wins a keychain in a lucky dip. There are numbered jars filled with lollies and sundry confections. These you gain a chance of winning by drawing from a basin filled with raffle tickets, which my son’s friend Luca insightfully refers to as ‘gambling for children’.
It is also, it turns out, gambling for adults, as I find myself increasingly preoccupied with getting something – anything – from my rummaging, finally winning a Milka bar on my fourth purchase of three tickets for £1.
It wasn’t until I just typed out those very words that I realised the economics of that choice but, then, I am a dutiful parent and an earnest supporter of the school. So £4 for a chocolate bar is a small price to pay. You could say it’s just something I do.
