With 3 boys under 6, Buggy Blogger mum to J (5), B (3) and S (1) certainly has her hands full. This week she’s ready to Wish You a Swedish Christmas!

Deck the (school) halls with Ikee-a trolley-fuls, fa-la-la-la-laaah, la-la-la-la!

Yes, it's December. The tired plastic fir tree's been dragged from the headmaster’s store cupboard, the kids are practising bizarrely-lyricked camel songs for their Nativity play and we're all recovering from this week’s school Christmas Fair.

We'd been running round like headless hook-a-ducks for weeks in preparation. We’d gone round the local shops begging freebies for the raffle, press-ganged the parents for Tombola donations and raided the shelves at Ikea. Just how did school fetes manage before our favourite Swedish emporium arrived on the scene to provide for school PTAs in their hour of need?

We had a stash of Ikea ginger biscuits for the kids to ice and decorate, a refreshments stall armed with industrial supplies of Ikea paper napkins and an Ikea container stuffed with Haribos for the 'guess how many E-numbers … oops sweeties … are in the jar' game. Even the rota of badly-dressed daddies lurking petrified in Santa's grotto would be doling out Ikea hanging tree decorations as their 'ho ho ho, you've been a good girl this year' gift. Presumably if anyone had been a bad boy or girl they'd have been shafted with a large piece of flat-packed furniture instead.

Then there was the stall I was in charge of, the Lucky Dip. Or the 'Lucky Tip out your Tat' as I preferred to call it. We'd swathed a large cardboard box in … you've got it … jolly Ikea wrapping paper and filled it with shredded newspaper. We'd canvassed the parents to bring in prizes – discarded party bag gifts, bubbles, hair clips, old biros, half-eaten Kit Kats, debris from the floor of the car etc – and ended up with a veritable Aladdin's cave worth of dross. We then proceeded to wrap everything in newspaper – black and white for boys, FT for girls – and pushed it guiltily deep into the shredded paper.

I tried to look at it less as 'Crap in a Box for 30p' and more like a very modern shopping experience. Just like buying online, the young punters wouldn’t get to see in advance what they were purchasing, it'd probably turn out a disappointment and by the time they’d got it, it'd be too late to change their minds anyway. Forget Internet shopping, this would be 'here we go, hands at the ready and In Ter … Heck, wish I'd bought a mince pie with my 30p now'.

And so anyway, before you could say 'are we ready yet?' the day of the Fair dawned. After a rain-lashed evening the night before, we were gifted with a morning of wintry sunshine and a festive chill in the air. Perfect for encouraging folk to come inside and wander round, give their shoe soles a pounding and pick up things they didn’t really need that were probably a bit suspect in quality but hard to resist at the price. And then once they'd finished at Ikea they could head down to our Fair.

And come they did in their droves. At times it really was like Ikea on a Saturday – the wisest having arrived and left earliest, the less wise joining in the zoo-like fray later on, anyone thinking they'd be in and out in 20 minutes feeling sorely disappointed and the parking being really quite rubbish. Well, there IS no parking at our school so you can't get much more rubbish than that.

Luckily, though, the most important visitor of all managed to park his sleigh OK so there were no complaints on that front. And I chose to ignore the odd disgruntled comment upon the unwrapping of lacklustre-looking bouncy balls, a third of a jar of bubbles or another football keyring. If you've got your sights on bigger things kids then it's the guy in red you’ve got to ask.

Which is what J and B were hoping to do. They queued up patiently, surrendered their pocket money to the Year 6 elves and tremblingly ducked into the be-tinselled grotto. There he was … sharp intake of breath … the Big FC himself. 'Is it a costume? whispers J (Well the budget didn’t stretch to a deluxe Santa suit.) And 'can I have a Thunderbird Tracy Island please?' (Gulp, this is the first I've heard of this one.) And 'can I have the same as him' adds B?

Golly, so that's two versions of a now out-of-production cult toy that the boys are now convinced they're going to get, even in spite of having asked Santa on a Bad Suit Day. I'm really looking forward to trawling round eBay trying to locate the said elusive toy. Not. Hmm, shortcomings aside all of a sudden the idea of Christmas shopping in Ikea seems suddenly attractive in comparison.

'Tis the season to be so-rry (you ever encouraged them to go in and visit Santa's grotto in the first place), fa-la-la-la-laaah, la-la-la-la!

• Keeping your kids safe on the net
  
• PTA fundraising ideas
  
• Back to the Buggy Blog page