Christmas is Cancelled

To elaborate on yesterday's post, we have decided to cancel Christmas this year in my family for financial reasons.

Tammy will still get some nice gifts, the main one we already bought a while back, and we will make Christmas special for her, but we are pulling out of the family events and cancelling our travelling plans for the December holidays.

The reason being, we're moving Tammy to a different school in 2016, which I'll elaborate below. The move involves a large deposit (refundable when she leaves the school) which we were hoping to get help with from a family member who has unfortunately been unable to come to the party, meaning we've had to come up with R40k at short notice, which we've done through credit, but it means that for the foreseeable future we have zero disposable cash for anything other than bare necessities. This means no money for travelling and no money for Christmas gifts for anybody, even small ones.

This is a regrettable decision, one we are sad about, and one that will no doubt cause some shit in the family because it means we're dropping people and there are less presents to go under the collective tree. Believe me I'd love nothing more than to have no restrictions on the amount of money available to buy everybody wonderful gifts which they can be impressed with and love me more for, but unfortunately this decision is because we are striving to provide our only child with the best possible education and foundation for a good life, and at times like this means sacrifice and some inconvenience. Although saying that, it's not really a terrible thing for us. We'll be fine on our own, we'll have a pleasant little family Christmas at home and a nice quiet holiday. It'll be like we're still abroad, and we were quite happy back then. Though I don't expect everybody will be quite understanding of the situation, this is what it is and we'll do what we have to to make it work.

About the school; we are really sad to be leaving the CBC family. Tammy has been there since grade 00 through grade 0, R, 1 and 2. She's been happy, made lots of friends and her teachers have mostly been nothing short of incredible. We will miss the people at CBC and are grateful for them being instrumental in shaping Tammy into the awesome little girl she's developed into. But, the school has also started to fall by the wayside as far as management is concerned. Apart from having consistently appalling communication, the school seems to be having financial difficulties, the pressure of which is being passed onto the parents in the form of a 12% fee increase for 2016 which they cannot reasonably justify. The financial presentation offered to the parents last week was poor, inconclusive and indicative that the school is pulling the wool over our eyes. The school is a full NPO, meaning there are zero resources to fall back on and parent school fees are the only source of income. This is a big burden and a concern because if times get tighter there will be problems, and there are minimal funds for development like building a swimming pool or secure fencing between the kids and the drug dealers on the main road. Additional funds will need to come from our pockets too in the form of various fundraisers, should the school take on new projects.

The new school we're moving to, Elkanah House, is a highly spoken of school, one of the best in the Cape Town region, and although more expensive than CBC it has all the facilities like a pool, auditorium, great extra murals, etc on site. The teachers are world class, the school is small and well established, and is financially secure. It's generally a better school than CBC and we're fortunate to have bagged a spot for Tammy for grade 3. It's a big decision but one we've thought through and discussed extensively.

It just means we'll need to bite the bullet for a while until the deposit is paid off. We also need to buy new school uniforms, school bags, stationery, etc which also amounts to a lot of money which we need to come up with.

So hopefully this explains satisfactorily why we are cancelling Christmas this year - we had to choose between Christmas and Tammy's education. Sorry but it's a no brainer!