Visiting Santa at Castlecourt, Belfast

Yesterday after school we visited Santa in Castlecourt in Belfast. He and his elves were very jolly. We chose to have the photograph made into a snow globe to bring out year after year. Details of times are available on the Castlecourt website.

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Family Board Game Review- Santa's Rooftop Scramble!

Ravensburger played Santa to us this week, delivering their new Santa's Rooftop Scramble Board game for us to test out. It's a traditional travel-round-the-board style family game, for 2-6 people, with a suggested age of five and above. Our family consists of our son, almost six, my husband & me, and we sat down on Sunday afternoon to throw the die.

My initial thoughts were, 'there are an awful lot of instructions, this seems quite complicated for under 8s'. Straight from the box it does take ten minutes to get the hang of how to play, but once you get going it's less fussy than it looks. We wouldn't need to re-read the instructions if we took it out to play again for example. 

The object of the game is to spin a wheel to collect presents that your Santa must deliver, then move to the board and roll the die to travel around trying to land on the houses your lists match up with. The first Santa to deliver all his presents is the winner. My son won, much to his delight.  

Santa's Rooftop Scramble suggests it will become a tradition in your family to play every year around Christmas time, and I certainly agree it will be fun to bring out every year in December with the decorations & play together.  It's available on Amazon.

Free Personalised Video from Santa from Portable North Pole

This will be the third year running we've made a Portable North Pole video & it's become a Christmas tradition already. It's a free service that's very simple to use, which creates a personalised video for your child from Santa. 

This year you can link to Facebook to quickly & easily add photos of your little one which will then appear in the video in Santa's book!

You can watch the video for free, but you can also upgrade to download it to watch all year round if you so desire. I've a discount code that gives all my readers 10% off any of the merchandise in the Portable North Pole store. Just enter BLOG10BK 

Titanic Belfast's Victorian Christmas Wonderland

The Smyth family are now feeling super Christmassy, after our visit to www.TitanicBelfast.com this afternoon. Santa arrived with his reindeer, accompanied by the Salvation Army Band.

We feasted on candy canes.

And mingled with Victorian ladies and gents.
We then were very lucky to be some of the first families to visit Titanic Belfast's Victorian Christmas Experience, where Mister Claus has taken up residence in his Curiosity Shop from now until 23rd December. 

The adults are greeted with hot punch & mince pies, the children with cookies.

Amongst the cobbled street a Victorian lady reads The Night Before Christmas to the gathered children.

Next stop is snowflake making for the children, and Mum & Dad can relax with their hot punch.

With Santa living in the Curiosity Shop over the next few weeks, the trinkets & treasures have moved to the cobbled streets. There's time to buy some stocking fillers while you wait for your turn to visit Santa.

Then, when Santa's helper calls your child's name, you walk up the Victorian street to Scrooge, who checks to see if you are on the naughty or nice list!

Stand on the footprints outside Santa's Shop for a magical surprise.

I won't spoil your own visit to Santa by showing you the inside of his shop, but as a grown up it really is the perfect Santa experience.

The Titanic Victorian Christmas Experience is open every day from 26th Nov to 23rd Dec. It costs £15 per child which includes the visit to Santa, a photo and a gift. Adult price (13+) is £4 which includes Christmas punch and a mince pie or shortbread. 

For more details and to book, visit www.TitanicBelfast.com or call +44(0)289076 6399