Those in between days

Happy new year! I hope you had a good Christmas and feel rested and restored, ready to face the new year? Or perhaps you're just glad if you avoided covid and got to spend a little time with family or friends. It's hard to feel too optimistic about 2022. It's not that I feel pessimistic, more uncertain. I still feel that the next couple of months are precarious, and I'm nervous about booking any kind of holiday, even if we hope that things are more back to normal by the summer.

Anyway, Christmas. Ours was lovely. The days leading up to it were really busy, with booster side effects and colds thrown in for good measure, but we were able to spend time with family which, after last year, was so precious. 

The elves brought new pyjamas on Christmas Eve, as they do.

On Christmas day we ventured out for a walk in the woods with my parents - a bit of fresh air is the key to staying sane on Christmas day I think.

On Boxing Day my sister hosted a wonderfully relaxed late lunch. She made salmon en croute for the pescatarians, my mum brought a turkey and leek pie, and my contribution was tiramisu. We drank fizz from a local vineyard and played games, it was so nice. 

John went back to work on the 28th and then the children and I slipped into the best bit of Christmas in my opinion, the in-between days between Christmas and new year. The tree stays up until New Year's Day (at the earliest!) and those days are just as festive as the week leading up to Christmas for me, just a whole lot more relaxed. It's all jigsaw puzzles and leftovers to eat up and new books to read, heaven. 

The Christmas cake never gets eaten until well after Christmas, and usually lasts well into January as they children aren't that keen on it. Just before Christmas, I iced our cake with some ready made fondant and added these Snowman and Snowdog cake toppers I found in Lakeland. Angus had the lovely idea to make footprints behind the figures, as through they'd walked through the snow. 

There hasn't been too much cooking going on here as we had so much to eat up, but I have been using up leftover mincemeat in bowls of porridge, adding a little orange zest and some cranberries. 

We've been out for a walk most days, some longer than others. The weather all Christmas down here has been horribly wet, windy and mild. The photo below was taken on the only truly cold, wintry day we had over the holiday, when the sky was all pinks and blues in the late afternoon. 

All other walks have been to the beach, to escape the mud. 

My parents gave me a beautiful new thermos flask for Christmas, as my old one leaks, and we christened it with mulled wine drunk on the beach, and mince pies too of course. 

We spent New Years Eve with dear friends, eating curry and drinking margaritas to toast in the new year. We were a little bleary eyed Saturday but a walk and a pub lunch sorted everyone out.

We took down the Christmas tree today. I removed the decorations and fairy lights (most tedious job ever), then John put the boxes in the loft. He took down the outside lights and chopped up the tree for kindling, while I dusted and vacuumed and mopped inside. We both cleaned the windows. If felt like a fair division of labour all in all.  I miss the tree, miss its twinkling light in the evening, but like the extra space and daylight in the living room. This afternoon we went for a walk but it was so muddy we spent more time trying not to slip over than actually walking, and poor Ziggy had to have a shower when we got home, so he is sulking with us now. 

Tomorrow I go back to work, but I don't mind too much. The thought of going back is always worse than the reality, and luckily I like where I work and will be really happy to see some of my friends and colleagues after the break. January is a dark month, so there will be no crash diets, detoxes, resets or Dry January here, but hopefully a month of early nights, long walks at the weekend and gently doing the things we enjoy as we get into the rhythm of the new year. 

Festivities

Undeterred by work tiredness, school tiredness, coughs, colds, sore arms from boosters and constantly lingering Covid worries, we have been busy squeezing every last drop of joy out of December.

The month started very strongly with a trip to London to meet up with my book group friends. I was particularly excited about the journey: two hours each way with a book, a magazine, a coffee and my crochet and - crucially - no-one talking to me. Bliss. I needed to save my chatting energy for the friends I was meeting. We started our book group in May 2020 in the first lockdown (a mixture of people I already knew and new friends, scattered across the UK) and it was the first time we have met in person, and it was just wonderful.

We met for lunch at the Wolseley in Piccadilly, and were in there for four and a half hours, so a good lunch. There was time for a little pottering around the shops nearby, including a very festive Fortnum and Masons. Their windows were spectacular and, lit up, it was stunning as it grew dark.

At home, Christmas traditions continued, as familiar and comforting as a crochet blanket.

The homemade advent candle came out. Angus remembers to light it every Sunday night. 

Fairy lights are festooned liberally, including all over the front of the house too, a first for us. 

The children helped me decorated the tree, and I rearranged all their bauble choices once they were in bed.

We bought some chalk pens and had fun decorating the windows. 

The kids made peppermint bark, definitely one of their favourite Christmas treats. 

I spent a Friday night making Christmas cards. I have a few stamps from here which I've been collecting over the last few years and I experimented with layering different colour inks from the many stamp pads I have lurking in the spare room.

I dried oranges for garlands which I hung at the kitchen window and above the stove.

Then, last Saturday we went to London as a family to celebrate Bella's fifteenth birthday.

After arriving by train, we avoided public transport for the rest of the day, walking everywhere and taking a couple of taxis at the end of the day when we were getting tired.

Bella had the chance to visit a couple of shops which I've never heard of but apparently are very cool if you're a teenager, and we had a fantastic lunch here, ramen being Bella's absolute favourite food. 

We had booked tickets to go up The Shard but, as you can see from the above photo, there was a lot of low cloud that day and so the view was, sadly, non-existent. It was quite surreal, absolutely silent up there, and with no sense of where you were or how high up. Anyway, you get to re-use your tickets for free within a year, so we will have the opportunity to go again.

And now it is the Christmas holidays. I don't feel like I've stopped, but it's a nice kind of busy with meet ups with friends, walks with family and Christmas preparations. It feels like we're all quite deliberately trying to soak up every opportunity to be with the people we care about, with the prospect of another lockdown hanging over us. I've been distracting myself with the washing, cleaning, cooking, baking, wrapping presents, tidying up the piles of mysterious objects that build up around the house during term time. I had my booster on Tuesday and felt pretty rough yesterday which was a shame as it meant cancelling plans to see friends who were over from Australia, but that's covid for you, ruining plans for the last two years. 

In between all that I have been catching up with December's Stitch A Day and working on a crochet scarf from this book.

I had saved up enough points on my Waterstones loyalty card to treat myself to this gorgeous book, Advent: Festive German Bakes to Celebrate the Coming of Christmas, pictured above. It is beautifully written and photographed and I want to make everything but, due to life, have only had time to make some lebkuchen, which I still need to ice. 

For a bit of fun, I made these chocolate chip cookies from the blog Jane's Patisserie, recipe here. They are really good and so easy to make with the kids.

And it would not be Christmas without mince pies, or certainly not for me, anyway. I always use this recipe and my pies don't come out looking that neat, but the the pastry is so short and buttery and crumbly, they are really good. 

Today it is Christmas Eve Eve, or my sister Anna's birthday, as it's known in our family. My other sister, Katy, has hers on the 27th, a date she shares with her son. We have a lot of Christmas birthdays in this family! So I am popping round to see my sister with her gift before collecting my food shopping, then John, Bella, Angus and I are going to the pantomime this afternoon, a Christmas tradition I really missed last year. 

Tomorrow will involve cleaning and cooking (assembling a tiramisu, baking a chocolate log and roasting a ham), last minute wrapping and finally that sweet moment on Christmas Eve when, if it isn't done, it isn't going to be done, and you can relax a little.

Merry Christmas lovely blog readers. Thank you for being here, for reading and saying hello in the comments, even when I cannot be here as often as I once was. I hope Christmas is good to you, and you get to spend time doing things you enjoy with the people you love.