Christmas: After months of Covid, grandparents will do what they do best and dote – Scotsman comment

A justified generalisation about grandparents is that they dote on their grandchildren.
A nation of grannies will be hoping to see their grandchildren face-to-face this Christmas (Picture: Andrew O'Brien)A nation of grannies will be hoping to see their grandchildren face-to-face this Christmas (Picture: Andrew O'Brien)
A nation of grannies will be hoping to see their grandchildren face-to-face this Christmas (Picture: Andrew O'Brien)

So, after nine dreary months of Covid, it’s only natural that they would want to be a bit more generous on the Christmas present front.

According to a new poll, they plan to spend an average of £104 on each grandchild this year, up by £23 compared to last year. Add that all up together and it reaches the rather staggering sum of £2.4 billion across the UK.

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However, festive gift-giving is not without its pitfalls. Of the children surveyed, 14 per cent said they got “bad” presents from grandparents “fairly often” while five per cent revealed they had never actually received something they liked.

And some parents felt grandparents were going over the top or spending more than they could afford. Hopefully, the numbers doing so on bad presents were small.

But, in the end, Christmas should not really be about presents or money or material wealth.

Instead, it is about families getting together for a celebration and, if there’s ever a year when we needed one of those, it is the accursed 2020.

So, particularly at a time when people may be under financial pressure because of the pandemic, we should not stress too much about gifts.

If we get another lovingly hand-knitted but, frankly, terrible Christmas jumper, we should probably just go with it. It’s the laughs and teasing that we remember anyway.

Hopefully, we will all be able to celebrate Christmas as usual and do so in a way that is safe.

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