It’s not Christmas until you’ve planned to cook something and it hasn’t worked and you’ve had to rework your original idea. Enter Good Deed #2 for my workplace Kris Kringle.

After executing Good Deed #1 without a hitch (free flowers sourced from the school grounds and placed on their desk), I decided to continue the ‘free for me’ good deeds with some baking.

Our lovely Parents and Citizens had gifted us with a jar of biscuit ingredients (I think for World Teachers’ Day) that were just asking to be turned into some Christmas Tree biscuits. So I found the cutter, set the oven to the right temperature and got baking.

Total fail.

I feel I should have seen the writing on the wall at the point when I was concerned by the curved edges when I was expecting triangles… 

Despite my following the instructions, the biscuits came out half burnt. I blame my oven. Where the hottest part of the oven appears to be, defies the laws of physics as far as I’m concerned.

This is not the first time my oven has let me down in December. A few years back it smoked the place out, just cooking a Christmas cake. I got a new one after that.

Still, I’m not sure this one’s especially better. Thus making my good deed #2, in need of reworking.

Because it had to be ‘just right’.

Not that I normally gift people with burnt food, but there’s this element to Christmas that means we always try to step things up a notch or two. Everything has to be ‘just right’.

Even if you’re an atheist, you can have a reverence for Christmas Day. Maybe it’s because you don’t usually have to work. Or maybe it’s something else. One writer expresses the first Christmas in this way: “eternity enters time.”

Think about it. It’s a bit of a mathematical conundrum.

Yet if that’s what actually happened at Christmas time, when a little baby was born and placed in a manger, then it’s not just ‘right’ that we treat Christmas with a degree of reverence.

It’s critical that we do.

Yours in reverence,

Alison