Even during the Advent season, it helps if you can understand technical process descriptions without having to google a lot. Some cookie recipes can be pretty tricky if you don’t have the necessary basic knowledge. What is the all-in procedure? What is the purring of dough pieces? The pressure increases slightly when the difficulty level is “normal”.
Now that Christmas Eve and the eating of cookies are mostly over, it’s time for the next gift giving: the children’s toys are to be assembled. Playmobil and Lego recognized the problem long ago and made everything child-friendly. So mum or dad no longer have to laboriously decipher which red screw needs to be screwed into which yellow nut – no, the children can see for themselves which plastic wig fits which plastic head, and they can usually do this without much help.
But what nobody expected: that grandma has an origami folding book lying around. The six-year-old daughter grabs it, gets construction paper and watches you carefully as you read the origami instructions carefully. “Well, that’s very simple,” you try to encourage yourself and happily fold away. You fold, turn, and trim: “Right fold the lines in so that there is another triangle between the plies of the other.” Another triangle? fold in? A valley fold is also mentioned. There are no pictures. One looks morosely in the direction of Lego, where the four-year-old is already playing. “Don’t you want to…?” you try, but then you shake your head mercilessly. Origami! Origami!
“Grandma, can you help?” But grandma has already escaped. Then the uncle comes and says: “Give it to me.” You leave the room relieved. Enter it ten minutes later and be amazed: an origami frog and an origami elephant are already in their full glory, another origami rose is in progress. “How did you manage that?” The uncle acts as if it was the easiest thing in the world to see through the indescribable description. But his niece finally betrays him: “He watched it on his cell phone.”
The uncle finishes the origami rose and then quickly sits down for the four-year-old to build Legos. And while the daughter marvels at the paper animals, the origami book is quickly tucked away between other books. In an impenetrable valley fold.