“On the fifth day of Christmas My true love sent to me Five golden rings Four calling birds Three french hens Two turtle doves and A partridge in a pear tree.” Ever since I got married and more so since I had Emma, I had wanted a nativity scene. There is something about the visual and the palpable that makes Christmas more real for everyone, especially when you have little ones in the house. So I was delighted when we were invited to review for the Christmas Boutique and not only that, I was allowed to choose a product of my choice. As you can imagine, it didn’t take me long to decide on the product, it took me a bit longer to decide on the colour for our nativity set, as they come not only in burgundy but also in pink, green and black and gold. As soon as I put it out, it got loads of attention and questions from Emma. She wanted to pet baby Jesus, to play with the wise men …

Emma, like any other 5 year old girl out there, loves Frozen.She knows the songs (and begs me NOT to sing when I try to, as I “embarrass her”, haha), she has the movie, both Anna and Elsa’s dresses, a number of outfits sporting the princess sisters, Frozen bedding, blankie and cushion. Santa will be bringing her an Elsa doll to keep Anna doll (the one she got for her birthday) company. So when we were asked to review and get creative with a beautiful Anna and Elsa art set, guess what our response was?  Oh, yeah, you guessed it! Cause a girl can never have too many Anna and Elsa items, this we can agree on! Emma got busy right away with it, as soon as it arrived, and it was declared her favourite and best art set ever :-). We printed some Frozen colouring in pages to start with: Emma loves drawing and recently, following her teacher’s prompting, she has started talking about “using her imagination” to create things. So, I wasn’t surprised …

I have been told this so many times in the past few days. But I do not feel loved. I feel that our loss has made us stranger than a stranger to those who surround us. I am odd, a misfit, a foreigner, as in “a person not belonging to a particular place or group; an outsider.” When Georgie died, I wanted to make sense of his death. I wanted his death not to be in vain. I wanted his death to have a reason. To have an explanation. To lead to something noble. But then, I came face to face with the cruel reality. The reality is that death is not a subject we talk about as a society. It is a taboo. It is a nuisance. It is a too much in the face of comfort a subject. Death is classed as inappropriate in “civilised” conversation. Pick the weather, the seasonal trends or the pets. But not death. Never death. Death is not a comfortable subject, not even in church, not even in …