My two youngest kids are discussing Santa as I drive them home from school. At ages 9 and 7 neither of them are true Santa believers, but they happily discuss the logistics of Santa with the same enthusiasm with which they discuss imagined battles between Daleks and Cybermen.
“There’s not just one Santa, you know.” Gleek says confidently.
“Yeah. There’s lots.” Patch agrees.
“Thousands. One for each house so that everyone gets presents.”
Patch nods.
“And they use lights on Christmas trees as teleportation devices.”
“There’s only a problem if one of them dies.” Patch adds.
“No. Then the others would just take care of that house.” Gleek scowls at her brother.
“But if lots of them died then there would be trouble.” Patch says trying to find the failure parameters of the mythos.
“Yeah, but that won’t happen because it is Christmas.” Then Gleek turns away, confident in the happy imagined world she has made.
There is silence for a minute and then Gleek turns to me.
“Could we make grape flavored roofs?”
“I don’t think so. They would be kind of sticky. Why would we want to do that?” I ask, confused by the sudden change of topic.
“If we could, then the icicles would be grape flavor. Only…” Gleek’s eyebrows crease together. “We’d have to build a glass shield so that the icicles didn’t get dirty.” She ponders this as we pull into the driveway. Then we got distracted by the process of bringing things into the house and finding the cat for after-school petting. We never did find a solution to the problem of grape icicles. Perhaps tomorrow.
You might offer them grape or other syrup on their icicles? Here in Japan, shaved ice is very popular, especially in summer. Various toppings are available, including green tea, strawberry, and other fruit flavors. So I would think grape syrup on the icicles would work. A bit like eating snow.
The trick is finding clean icicles. The ones that form on the edge of our roof have dirt and tar in them. They’re pretty, but not great for eating.