Aaah, Sober T-D, now there was my point from the past: the women doing virtually all of it, well, in those days....and I fear, often still today. You're a champ, sir, for stepping up to do the Great Clean Up yourself after all these years (while you wife mutters to herself, in her pj's '...and not before time!' :-))
'Family factions' - beautifully put. Yeah, the lead-up to, and executing of, Christmas in many families is not too dissimilar to extremely tense and delicate diplomatic negotiations between nation-states.
Glad it went off well for you.
Delilah, I'd forgotten about NORAD tracking Santa. I wish we'd had that kind of thing back when my girls were little, long before the internet. Mind you, it probably would've been me on it - having been a somewhat tech nerdy child as a young gel: I remember sitting on the floor next to the big old bakerlite radio, infinitesimally moving the tuning dial on SW (shortwave) until I found a glimmer of something from Russia and the like. Absolute amazement.