And I say this advisedly: my kid’s basketball team just won their annual country-schools tournament. He’d been looking forward to it for a full year. He got the man of the match player award, whatever it’s called. He was their star. The school goes all December-parenting in the lead up to Country Week, with a three-strikes-no-Christmas “discipline” system. My kid was on two strikes. Two. The first one was well and truly earned, the second was plainly bullshit from a teacher who’d be all in on the Elf-on-the-Shelf surveillance and punishment system and who was enjoying having a bigger stick than usual. And if he had got that third strike, he would have been devastated and we would have sucked it up and taken it, because life fucking lessons, people. (And also…the school’s about to find out what some parents find out in January, because there’s a whole term to go and there ain’t no term-4-senior-year school camp to threaten the loss of this year)