Christmas Preparations

The tree is up and decorated (white lights, teeny gold baubles, a few beautiful birds and reindeer), holly and berries have been foraged and arranged in vases, 4 dozen mince-pies have been made and almost half consumed already. The presents-in-jars have been made and are almost labelled. The extra presents have been bought. No Christmas cards have been written yet but we are not sending many this year. Pictures to follow when the camera lead arrives.

PS. Many thanks for all your kind words yesterday. They mean a lot. Things are looking up, I think.

Christmas Preparations (Part 2)

A fleeting visit to Shropshire this weekend. Returned to London late last night having spent the weekend looking after M's Grannie. His parents are away on the other side of the world visiting relatives so it was decided that buying them a Christmas tree would be a good use of the afternoon and that it would be a nice thing for them to come home to. We got into the car and drove towards Shrewsbury, hoping to come across somewhere selling trees. With surprising ease we found somewhere and helped M's Grannie across the rather uneven ground. If she had started gesturing with her stick I wouldn't have been surprised. We were after one which wouldn't shed it's needles but it was hard to spot them among the motley collection of spruces which were already showing signs of going brown and dry at the bottoms. We sized up a fair few before we settled on the one we bought. The polar opposite to the tree which we chose for our own house - where ours is a deep green fir, bushy and rotund the tree we bought yesterday was a much paler greeny green, tall with dense but sparse branches which will make decorating it much easier. At over 7 foot high it just managed to be persuaded into the car; in situ it looks rather fine, reminiscent somehow of a desert plant.

Christmas Preparations

We bought our Christmas tree yesterday, from a Christmas Tree 'forest' near Highbury. We went there on the off-chance, the tail end of a busy 24 hours. We had a meal with friends on Saturday night, complete with crackers and silly hats. B made the roast, M provided the wine and I brought some home made mince pies (mince meat and all). We drank wine and talked and played poker and ended up sitting round drinking vodka and coke from pint glasses and watching the Hatton fight. About 7 hours later I ate 'breakfast' in the Hummingbird Bakery in South Kensington before going to the Golden Age of Couture exhibition at the V&A. After meeting M after he finished work we passed the Christmas trees on the way home and went in. We wandered up and down the rows of trees wondering which one was the one for us. A teeny tiny one? Not much value for money. An enormous one for our enormously high ceilings? No, too heavy for M to carry home. We ummed and ahhed over sizes, varieties, stands and the overall costs. Should we have the one that looked rejected. Should we have a living one? In the end we chose a medium sized one with bushy branches which M was able to carry home with (relative) ease. We managed to screw the base on and clear a space by the end of the sofa and I even managed to plug the lights in before the tree was in situ. Once the lights were on and the 5 decorations which we own were hanging on the tree I felt positively Christmassy and even heated up some mulled wine.

Tonight I plan to make some more decorations for the tree by drying slices of orange and hanging them with red ribbon. I will be doing this just as soon as I have bought a punch bag.