Our little Archie just turned 18 months old and already he is a dab hand at the iPad. It’s being rather useful when we’re trying to distract him from teething discomfort — but at the same time, we’re trying to avoid making it a guaranteed addition to ‘business as usual’, lest he grow up unable to eat, drink or wash without an iPad stuck to his face.
If you’ve slightly older children, though, I think they might appreciate Santa’s Big Helper for iPhone or iPad. It’s got a wealth of functions — the most important I reckon being the Santa Tracker and the sleeps-til-Christmas counter. You can write to Santa, receive Elf updates via video and you can even see the “Elf Cam” which shows Santa coming down your own Chimney (or similar, if you haven’t got one of those) — it’s basically a super-imposed X-Ray-style video of Santa that you then superimpose over your fireplace/living room. I think your average 5 year old will certainly buy it.
This could well be one of those apps that helps up the ante of excitement and expectation for the coming festive period. It’s $0.99 on the App Store and you can find it here.
Ewan, what are your memories as a child with regards to the excitement of Christmas? Thankfully at this time of the year my two are still very much interested in the old school advent calendar so I’m sorting of getting to relive all my childhood “Christmas build up” through them again, but my eldest must have seen this, or something very similar on the iPhone her best friends Mum has as she told me at the weekend that the “Santa on the phone” was pretty cool!
Gareth, I really did enjoy the whole advent calendar thing as it did stretch the excitement into the early days of December when, frankly, not a lot is going on!
I can’t remember if the news programmes did the ‘Santa spotted over North Pole’ stories when I was young (or when my brothers were younger and I was older) but that used to give me a huge thrill!
Ah yes those TV programmes! Remember watching them when we were in Poole, so that was at least 1983-4! Actually as my wife pointed out, up here it is much easier to keep the belief going as in Finnish mythology the home of Santa, the fell where his workshop and everything is, is actually in our municipality. Then the children here it referred to in al the stories and things! And of course the biggest of the “Santa Post offices” is in Rovaniemi so we pass it every time we go shopping there! 🙂