Why We Don't Buy Christmas Presents At The Two-Dollar Shop

We don’t, generally, because we’re a small family with a small pool of recipients—but the family has developed, by some strange sort of Christmas osmosis, the habit of adding what we call “the five-dollar present” to the main gift.

To add to that, my mother really enjoys anything that lights up and, for preference, makes an obnoxious noise. She the kind of woman who presses all the buttons in the toy section of Kmart.

(Something that Nick made me promise to stop doing, on pain of not coming shopping with me any more.)

So my brother and I wandered down to find something to add to Mam’s obnoxious Christmas orchestra, and found a jumping Santa playing the saxophone.

Brilliant, right?

Less brilliant that night, after my nephews figured out how to turn it on themselves—a jumping, singing Santa takes quite a while to become boring for a two-year-old and a four-year-old.

But they had fun singing, “Jump, jump, jump, ‘cause that’s what I do.”

It wasn’t until tonight that we heard the full lyrics:

Jump, jump, jump, ‘cause that’s what I do,
Jump, jump, jump, ‘cause I’m the Easter Bunny: it’s true.

Methinks Santa has been dipping a little too deep into the sherry.