To try and recreate a Christmas market in my back garden.

[Namechabged]

All I’ve got so far is an extension lead so I can plug a slow cooker and a microwave in outside, and taking £100 out of the cash machine. I’m thinking I sling four bottles of Aldi mulled wine and some sliced oranges in the slow cooker and charging myself £7 deposit for a mug and £6 for a top up, and then mircrowaving some hotdogs and doughnuts and Nutella and charging £6 for them too. I haven’t got any further than that but welcome ideas.

Waffles loaded with molten chocolate that goes all over you with the first bite if your going for the Brussels market vibe.

Or take your mum who constantly repeats "how much! You have more money than sence!" Who then tuts for the next hour before you get pissed off and drive her home.

Sherpa bed throw stalls at every corner

Knock up some marshmallow/strawberries on a stick you’ve thrown some chocolate on that cost pennies to make....place them at your DCs eye level so you can pay £5 each...always a winner 🤨

Ooww much?! 😂🤣

Don't forget to add some smokers in there, get a waft whilst your jostling to get past folk with their buggy's.

Don’t forget to ask 15 neighbours to drink out of the mug first, merely rinsing it in cold water between each neighbour

Lay out all your Christmas decorations individually and charge yourself £1 for each of them

Pick n mix? £10 for a couple of cola bottles & a jelly snake?

And definitely don’t forget to recreate the 1.5 mile long park and ride bus queue

Erm, I think you forgot the stall selling light sabers / wands/ swords that glow but you’re not really sure why but remember some story from the 1980s about them being radioactive so you say no three times before saying FFS OK then you can have one.

The price? £15 each or two for £40.

Yeah make sure the pic n mix items are made of heavy jelly and enormous. The cost of a tall bag full (how profligate!) will equal your monthly utilities bill.

Ensure your lawn is thoroughly churned up and apply wet mud to everything up to a height of 1.5ft.
Including yourself.
Mix lots of cables and trip hazards in. Maybe a hole or two.

The day after your extravaganza survey the trampled carnage. Sell some very competitively priced extortionate tickets to yourself and take Daily Mail sad face photos of you and the kids. Send to the press and complain pitifully about how you were ripped off and the kids have had the magic of Christmas ruined forever.
Perhaps include a muddy, hungover Santa and elves in the back of the shot.

You will need all of the following:

Stale almonds dipped in some sort of fructose-syrup/faux cinnamon concoction and heated a temperature you’d associate with the centre of a volcano. Alternatively, burned chestnuts with a shell so sharp that attempting to remove it without protective equipment will require stitches.

Some sort of gifty wifty thing that can be personalised with your name in metal work.

Sheds cut in half and stuffed full of Scandi cushions where you will feel obliged to spend £25 on a clutch of drinks in order to sit in them.

You'll need some kind of floor matting that simultaneously has overlapping bumps and massive gaps, so you can trip and stumble dropping everything you're carrying.

A giant marshmallow stall where every flavour is something like marmite on toast / pimms / banofee pie. Buy one for the kids knowing they will hate it, cursing that there are no normal flavours. Queue again to get within a metre of the adjacent fire bowl to toast the marshmallow, which takes half an hour and they still haven't changed colour so you eat lukewarm rubbery perfume lump of sugar. Bonus points if you burn the sleeve of your coat.

@JaniceBattersby

Erm, I think you forgot the stall selling light sabers / wands/ swords that glow but you’re not really sure why but remember some story from the 1980s about them being radioactive so you say no three times before saying FFS OK then you can have one.

The price? £15 each or two for £40.

My frirnd and I found an "early" one of these on the 70s. We were terrified and took it to the police station who told us what it was so we kept It. It took months to fade

(This was years before The Simpsons and their opening credits - we just knew )

I'm going to get out a pasting table and fill it with crap I've bought at previous Christmas markets. Marked up, of course. And maybe invest in a substandard snow machine, where I can stand with a boiling hot mulled wine in a melting paper cup, while my jeans get soaked.

You need to charge £5 for cheap German baubles goo OP!

And you need special German mustard.

Do you have access to anything vaguely resembling a husky - looking a bit menacing- that you can tie up outside a shed (Santa's workshop) and let the howling commence? Remember nobody can touch the dog. It's for show only.

@JaniceBattersby

Erm, I think you forgot the stall selling light sabers / wands/ swords that glow but you’re not really sure why but remember some story from the 1980s about them being radioactive so you say no three times before saying FFS OK then you can have one.

The price? £15 each or two for £40.

You've got to get lightsabers so that the kids start out having a fun play fight, despite your warnings that it'll end in tears, until one of them hits the other too hard/pokes them in the eye and they get into a full on fight. So then you have to wrestle them apart and put up with sulking all evening.

Also, a jewellery stall that sells that weird spirally silver jewellery that nobody has bought since the 90s.

Oh and some weird helicopter on an elastic band thing that just doesn't bloody fly.

I am laughing out loud so much I just had to rush off and have a wee

Only offer yourself those sausages that are essentially minced gizzards in a sleeve of chewy intestine

Chop up a few of these and pour a jar of Asda Smart Price curry sauce over these hideous scrags of sausage. Serve a tiny portion of it in a stale hotdog roll and call it Traditional German Curry Wurst.

Charge yourself £6.99.

@FazeleysRoyale

I am laughing out loud so much I just had to rush off and have a wee

@FazeleysRoyale raises a good point. Have you installed a line of portals - one per 2,000 visitors is about the right ratio. Make sure they're physically as far away as possible from the market, maybe pop them by the car you've parked 5 streets away? Whatever you do though, don't add lights or loo roll.

Portals = portaloos, obvs.

@LonnyVonnyWilsonFrickett

You forgot to add a charge - £2 per visit. This will seem cheap to the people who’ve just paid £5 for a paper cup of something that might optimistically be called “mulled wine” and £8 for some “artisan fudge”.

Don't forget to let the OLD/tinder world know you have the perfect venue for their not-awkward-at-all first meet ups.

Some additional hand holding so in love, loved up couples would also add to the ambiance.