MY CHILDREN have been celebrating St Nicholas' night every year since they were small.

Few people in this country know about this lovely, magical tradition, but it's something handed down from their dad's side of the family (their grandparents and great grandparents are a mix of German, Swiss, Czech and Hungarian).

Every year when they go to bed on December 5, they have to polish their shoes and leave them outside their bedroom door.

And in the night St Nicholas (Sinterklaas in Dutch, which is where we get Santa Claus from) comes to the house and leaves a bar of chocolate in their shoes.

The story goes that this is how Father Christmas can check all the names in his big book and knows exactly where all the children sleep and what presents he needs to bring on Christmas Eve.

The excitement of waking up and finding a bar of chocolate in their shoes seems just as big a deal for my kids as getting their stocking and presents on Christmas morning. It makes you realise children aren't really greedy for expensive presents, they love the whole idea of Santa.

This year was especially poignant. People tell my son that he looks just like his dad, but I don't usually see it.

However, as I watched him over-enthusiastically applying shoe polish on Friday night, he looked like a mini version of his late father.

Added to that he was telling me as he went along how much brushing his shoes always reminds him of daddy.

It was also sad because the younger of my daughters is away from home for the first time and I was left with the predicament of wondering if St Nick still brings chocolate (or advent calendars) to children when they begin to fly the nest.

I know, my older children probably should have grown out of all this by now, but because they were only 10 and 12 when their baby brother was born they have always happily gone along with all the Santa stuff for his sake (it's free chocolate — what's not to like?).

Anyway, I phoned daughter number two in Cardiff to ask if I should put her advent calendar in the post. But she said her boyfriend had bought her one already, so it was OK for me to hang on to it until she gets home (which is this weekend! Yippee!). When I phoned again and told her not to forget about putting her shoes out for St Nicholas she humoured me in a slightly bored mum's-losing-her-marbles voice.

But I phoned her back later that night and insisted she had to leave her shoes outside her door. By this time she was in the pub with her friends and I could tell she thought this was getting beyond a joke and she was a bit snappy as she hung up on me with a 'yes mum!'.

It was lunch time on Saturday (St Nicholas day) when I got her text message. She'd obviously only just got up and looked in her shoes: 'OMG! St Nicholas came!!!! Big Galaxy!'

For those of you who need a translation, OMG is teenage girl text message speak. It's used to emphasise shock, surprise and disbelief, and it's short for Oh My God!

When spoken, the gaps between the O the M and the G get longer and longer, the more dramatic the teenage girl or the situation.

I once had three separate text messages, for extra emphasis: the first text read just 'O'. Which I thought was sent in error. The next said 'M'. And then I got the 'G!' and understood. It really tickled me.

Most of the time I quite like the way teenagers and young adults have evolved a new language, somewhere half way between the written and spoken word, which they use to great effect for texting.

They have realised that sentiments which might be perfectly proper when expressed in a letter or an email, come across as pompous and bossy, or just plain rude, in a short text message.

Instead they send texts which are short and sweet and funny, with a carefully light approach. I suspect it's something they became super-sensitive about at school because of the need to avoid text message bullies.

I did think it was going a bit far when I had a text message which used the word 'like' in the same way that teenagers drop it into sentences as a filler word rather than a pause or full stop.

It's like, bad enough, like, when it becomes like a bad conversational habit (if you see what I mean).

It's amazing to see how the word has spread from the 60s' hippies, with their 'like wow man'.

Then it turned up a generation later with the stereotypical Californian Valley girls (the hippies' kids) who like, ya know, dropped the word into every sentence in a like, dreamy spaced out way.

Twenty or 30 years later my daughters and their friends use it all constantly. Like gets used in lots of ways, not just as a replacement for 'um'. It's also used instead of 'said' as in: "She was like, 'I'm not going' and I was like, 'Why not?'"

I know that different generations have their own filler words: I get annoyed whenever I catch myself saying actually all the time. And when I was younger my personal pet hate was the word 'goes' used instead off 'said'. I suppose 'like' is a marginal step up.

But anyway... my daughter's texted OMG! signified that she was rightly impressed with the way I managed to organise Santa to magic chocolate all the way from Torquay into her nicely polished shoes in Wales.

Nobody knows exactly how the magic worked, but I think silly old Santa really should have had a bit more sense and used the opportunity to let go. I have a sneaking suspicion that Santa's suffering from a bit of empty nest syndrome. Sorry, but you're not Timothy Lumsden's mum, you're Santa. You've got to let go. Move on. Get over it...