#91, The Grinch slithered in
Imagine if we didn’t live in these United States, we have thought many times over the past two years. How about another country (must be a rich one)? Where daycare is free, where daycare teachers are treated like queens, where rapid tests are abundant, where everyone is vaccinated, where schools stayed open, where a biking mom is president, where children play outside no matter the weather, where the chocolate is better and where there are more varieties of it, where Advent calendars are an entire industry, where the patterns on children’s clothes are tasteful and whimsical, where boys wear bright colors, where there are badgers on clothes is that a toddler dress with badgers on it, where there are no guns.
If you’d settle for just some of this, and it’s the buying-things part only, well then allow me to tell you about The Post Lady.
Because if you really want to up your kids’ Instagram clothing game, Hanna Andersson will absolutely not cut it. Polarn O. Pyret can now be found at the Chestnut Hill Mall in Newton, Massachusetts, next to a Lululemon, so no thank you. You are going to need to buy your Scandi kids’ clothing directly from the source.
Also you are going to need an intermediary. That intermediary is The Post Lady. For £29.95 per year (USD $40.70), she will sell you a UK shipping address. You shop your American heart out on the European children’s clothing internet, have it shipped to your The Post Lady address, and then she repackages all your things for you into one “cost-effective” package and ships it to you in the U.S. It’s clearly a giant waste of money and bad for the earth, but the American heart wants what the American heart wants and what the American heart — your kind of American heart — wants is, oh my God!
I signed up for The Post Lady when I needed (wanted) to buy Alice this specific coat with penguins on it for her sixth birthday from the precious UK brand Frugi. That was two years ago, and I realized pretty quickly that I was not and never would be rich enough to buy my kids European clothes, but I forgot about the Post Lady subscription and it auto-renewed by accident and … well, here we are at the Advent calendars.
It started with this tweet back in October.
Do you remember October? It was a pretty okay month, school and daycare were open, we were all like “oh Halloween’s gonna be pretty normal this year.” As I type this, I can’t even remember if October was when Delta was. Maybe we didn’t feel great? Better than we do now, though. What I know for sure is in October I had the brain space and the childcare to seize on Kathryn’s tweet, get really excited about Christmas, and decide to take advantage of my extant Post Lady membership to order a bunch of chocolate and Advent calendars and other stuff from the UK for Christmas.
A bunch of other moms went in on the order with me and here’s one of the three 20-kilogram boxes that arrived at my house one day in late November.1
I was staggering around with these giant boxes trying to divvy up everyone’s orders before it was time to go pick up the kids. Kevin came down to refill his coffee and I was like “DON’T ASK. DON’T ASK AND DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT!”
That night while we were watching TV, we ate a little bit of the supposedly famously better British milk chocolate and both came to the conclusion that it was, like … okay. I’m eating a Kit Kat Santa going no no I really think this is much, much better, but my heart wasn’t in it.
Kevin: “Why did you order so many of these Crunchie bars? I really don’t like them.”
I bought one Cadbury Dairy Milk Advent calendar for each child. On December 10 or so, we noticed that the December 24 door on Alice’s calendar had been opened and the chocolate inside it eaten.
Hugh was the obvious and really only possible culprit, Eileen is too little. It doesn’t add up, though. He had trouble opening the doors on his own Advent calendar and usually asked me to do it for him. He can’t reliably read the number 24 and doesn’t know its significance. He doesn’t really care about chocolate. As Alice began her questioning he seemed truly baffled, before offering a theory.
“I think the Grinch slithered in under the door,” he said.
None of us, except for Alice, had the heart to investigate further. If I took Ativan I would say it was me, I went downstairs in the middle of the night and ate it in a trance. But I don’t take Ativan. And anyway I had my own stash of British chocolate if I wanted it, which, it turned out, I didn’t really.
Kevin and I agreed that our favorite kind of chocolate is Tony’s Chocolonely, which you can buy here in the U.S. at a lot of places. Their whole thing is being very ethical (but I like it just because it’s very good). They have an Advent calendar that is in fact only sold in the U.K., and that I did not buy because I didn’t think my kids would appreciate it.
This year, it turns out, Tony’s Chocolonely did an Advent calendar prank that fell so flat it made international news.
I had tried to order rapid tests from the UK, by the way. They’re free to residents there — but maybe they sell them cheap, too, I thought?
But no, it turns out: They don’t sell them at all. An American couldn’t buy them even if she wanted to.
The items we ordered, if you were wondering: ASDA Extra Special 9 Month Matured Luxury Christmas Pudding 400g, Cadbury Roses Chocolate Tub, Lyle’s Golden Syrup 700g, Carr’s Seasonal Selection, Hula Hoops Variety Multipack Crisps, Cadbury White Christmas Collection Large Festive Bars, Maltesers Reindeer Chocolate Christmas Advent Calendar, Cadbury Heroes Chocolate Advent Calendar, Cadbury White Chocolate Advent Calendar, Cadbury Dairy Milk Freddo & Friends Chocolate Selection Carton, Cadbury Dairy Milk Advent Calendar 90g, Cadbury Advent Calendar 267g, Glace Cherries, Christmas Snowman Cake Topper, Home Baking Mixed Peel, Terry's Milk Chocolate Orange, Cadbury Dairy Milk Little Robins Bag, Cadbury Caramilk Golden Caramel Chocolate Bar, Cadbury Dairy Milk Buttons Chocolate Tube, Nestle Rolo Milk Chocolate and Caramel Giant Tube, Cadbury Chocolate Mini Snowballs Bag, Smarties Milk Chocolate Christmas Penguin Multipack, ASDA Christmas Lollipops, Cadbury Heroes Chocolate Tub 800g, ASDA Extra Special Handmade Clotted Cream Fudge, Galaxy Smooth Milk Chocolate Large Christmas Selection Box, Cadbury Twirl Milk Chocolate Bars, Yorkie Milk Chocolate Bars Multipack, Cadbury Curly Wurly Milk Chocolate Bars 6 Pack, ASDA Extra Special Orange Indulgence Dark Chocolate Bar, ASDA Extra Special Extra Special Handmade Caramelised Biscuit Fudge, Maltesers Chocolate Box, ASDA Extra Special Dark Chocolate Mint Indulgence Bar, Cadbury Wispa Chocolate Bars 4 Pack, Cadbury Caramel Milk Chocolate Bars 4 Pack, Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate Bars 4 Pack, Nestle Christmas Selection Box, ASDA Extra Special Handmade Salted Caramel Fudge, Cadbury Dairy Milk Freddo & Friends Chocolate Tub, Maltesers and Friends Chocolate Large Christmas Selection Box, ASDA Extra Special Extra Special Gin & Rhubarb Gin Flavour Chocolate Truffles, ASDA Extra Special Extra Special Handmade White Chocolate Honeycomb, Cadbury Crunchie Milk Chocolate Bars 4 Pack, Celebrations Chocolate Tub, Terry's Chocolate Orange Dark, Cadbury Dairy Milk Buttons Twisted Chocolate Bag, Terry's Chocolate Orange Minis White, KitKat Kat Santa Milk Chocolate Multipack, ASDA Extra Special Dark Chocolate Ginger Thins, Cadbury Festive Friends Chocolate Biscuits, and ASDA Extra Special Luxury Mince Pies 6pk.
Terry’s Chocolate Orange Minis White were really good. If you ever need them, you can buy them here. You don’t need a Post Lady subscription.