All I Want For Christmas

Each year retailers and perfume brands blow the marketing budget with sparkly Christmas adverts sporting sickly soundtracks sung by Dusty-Springfield-wannabe singers. They present us with animated penguins with cute kids impeccably dressed, with nothing smeared round their faces or spilled down their Christmas jumpers. All in a bid to make us buy stuff. Well I don’t want ‘stuff’ for Christmas. What many mums want is very simple and it doesn’t involve a single shop shelf and checkout till. And it’s not too late to organise either.

There are gifts which require little or no money you can give a parent. A child-free day just for the sake of it. A house with nobody in it at all for hours, so I can read a book (maybe even finish one) or watch a film I’ve watched a hundred times before. So I can take a bath in silence until my skin shrivels up. An afternoon to take a long walk, making up the route as I go alone or an uninterrupted yoga session in a over-heated living room.

But if you want to treat that special someone, for the price of a trendy new outfit and a bottle of eau de parfum you could probably organise a company to do a professional deep clean on their house. Personally speaking, a fancy dress and the latest it-scent wouldn’t wipe the memory of my dirty and untidy house. The real source of stress would be staring me in the face instantly plunging back to the boring and somewhat unachievable household to do list.

It would be pure bliss to get asked to disappear for the day while a crack domestic crew get every single scratch and smudge off the walls. They deep clean the oven, steam press the curtains, plump the sofa cushions and banish every blemish on the covers. The carpets are miraculously buffed and fluffed from edge to edge to be one colour.

Or one day, I get a knock on the door from a declutter expert, who helps me tidy, charity bag-up, recycle and dump everything we don’t need and use. They reorganise every draw and cupboard, even the loft and the boot of your car.

How about the ultimate unglamourous but rewarding gift, a voucher for the car wash. I’m not kidding! I can never justify splashing out on the titanium-or-whatever package at the local hand wash place. I would LOVE the car to be valeted, shampooed and waxed down to each groove on on the tyres. The interior of all the windows to be rendered smudge free, the foot-wells to be wrapper free and every teeny tiny crumb to be removed from the kids car-seat.

Believe it or not, there could still be time to organise this before Christmas Day. Just ask Task Rabbit, a new service matching independent ‘taskers’ in Brighton to come and help you with your chore. Using their web site or mobile app, you choose from a list of vetted people in your area who offer the task you’re looking for, you have a chance to review price and chat with them. The best thing is, unlike some cleaning agencies, you can hire local people in your neighbourhood for one-off chores or bespoke help without committing to a minimum amount of labour a month. As a self-employed person with a varied income throughout the year, this is ideal.

Task Rabbit have offered BrightonMums.com to try out the service and will be sending someone to sort out my oven! Watch this space for a review.