That was the night Saint Nicholas came, and we knew the little ones had been good.
So we prepared two colouring and cutting activities for them, to be done at home together with the children.
Colouring and cutting look like ways of filling time, but they are among the few activities that work directly on something very concrete: the hand that will do the writing. Scissors require the two hands to do different things at the same time — one cuts, the other turns the paper — and staying on the outline calls for exactly the kind of fine control that, a few months later, the letters written between the lines of an exercise book depend on.
Colouring inside the lines adds something else: sustained attention on a task that does not finish straight away. A child who sees a started sheet through to the end has practised patience far better than if they had simply been told to be patient.
And the most important part was the "together". Half an hour at the same table, with the scissors and the pencils between you, is worth more than the activity itself, and it is usually what stays in the memories of the holidays.