Fourteen Hours to Fill and Nobody Warned You

It is quarter past four on the twenty fourth and you have run out of day.

The presents are wrapped. The food is as done as it is going to get. And there are still four hours of a child who has been vibrating since breakfast and has nothing to point that at. This is the hour where most Christmas Eves go wrong, and it is not really about excitement.

Every family fills the hours differently and that part does not matter much. What matters is that the child can see the edges of the day.

Why a good day still ends in tears

Excitement and anxiety run on almost the same equipment. The racing heart, the stomach, the inability to sit down. A seven year old cannot tell you which one she is having, and by six in the evening the difference stops mattering because the tank is empty either way.

Add the other thing that happened today. School is finished, the routine that normally carries her through a Tuesday has gone, visitors may have appeared, and the food is at odd times. That is a lot of change on one day.

The Child Mind Institute’s advice for holiday breaks keeps circling the same point, which is that children need to be told what is coming and told more than once. The neuropsychologist Nechama Sorscher puts it in a way that is easy to remember when you are tired.

So the first job of Christmas Eve happens at breakfast, not at four in the afternoon. Say the day out loud. Walk, lunch, quiet hour, the box, dinner, bath, one film, bed. Then say it again after lunch.

Give the day three or four pegs

A peg is something with a time on it. Not a list of activities, which is just more waiting with extra steps. Two in the afternoon, we walk. Five o’clock, the box. That is what a child can hang the day on.

• Something outside, before dark. Anything. The cold does more for an over-wound child than any craft, and it moves the day forward in a way sitting at a table does not.
• Something with their hands, mid-afternoon. Icing, wrapping the one present they are giving, laying the table. Jobs beat entertainment on this particular day, because a job has an end.
• Something at dusk. This is where the box goes if you do one. Ours is deliberately small and deliberately boring, and for an older child who calls the whole idea babyish there is a version that survives being twelve.
• Something flat out, last. A film, a long book, the sofa. Whatever it is, keep it the same every year, because that is the bit that ends up being the tradition. If the film itself starts the argument, the age question is not really about age.

What you are avoiding is a day of open-ended freedom, which sounds lovely and is not. Freedom on the twenty fourth mostly produces a child following you around the kitchen asking how long.

The quiet hour is not optional

Somewhere between three and five, everybody stops. Separate rooms if you have them. Audiobook, comic, nothing. It will be resisted and it is still the single highest-value hour of the day.

The reason is arithmetic. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine says children aged 3 to 5 need 10 to 13 hours of sleep in every 24. Children aged 6 to 12 need 9 to 12. Christmas Eve routinely takes two of those hours away at the front end, and Christmas morning takes another off the back. A child running that deficit is not going to be pleasant on the day you have spent six weeks preparing.

An hour of nothing in the afternoon does not fix the sleep, but it buys back some of the regulation. If the bedtime itself is the part that always breaks, that has its own full write-up on getting them down on the one night they will not go.

If the house is full

Visitors change the maths. A child who is coping fine alone will not always cope with nine adults. The request to perform, to hug, to say thank you, lands at the exact moment she has nothing left.

Two things help. Tell her in the morning who is coming and roughly when they leave. And agree a place she is allowed to go, with permission, without asking. Upstairs, the back step, the car. Having somewhere is usually enough that she never uses it.

Your evening may include a service, or a long sit at somebody else’s table. Three hours among grown-ups is a different problem to a long car journey, and it needs different things in the bag.

The version where you do almost nothing

Some years you are not going to manage pegs. Somebody is ill, or working, or the day just goes.

Then do one thing at one time and say it in the morning. At seven we watch the film. That is enough of a shape for a child to lean on. It is also enough of a tradition to be missed if you skip it next year.

The morning has its own shape worth deciding in advance, and the order you open things in matters more than the things. Then comes the long week after, which is a different job again. Anyway. The wait is the thing you are looking after, not the wow.