Decking the halls

with abundant tinsel (fa la la la la, fa la la la!)

Back to work this morning which was all very jolly and good to be back. I emptied our house of library stuff and managed to only come home with a couple of cds, but I did sit for nearly an hour at the enquiry desk looking up books on fantastic fiction and ordering loads to read over the next few weeks to make up for not getting loads of lovely new books for Christmas (always used to be one of the things Ady would buy me).

Home for lunch and then we made a start on the Christmas decorations. We’ve managed to get trees up in the lounge, Scarlett’s bedroom, Davies’ bedroom and the playroom. The one in the lounge is bedecked with cookies, candy canes, chocolate santas. The children went crazy with tinsel so the bannisters on the stairs are twined with it, there is some draped round the kitchen sink taps, various bits slung around every surface (curse the surfaces Ali!) and the ceiling is fully dangling with foil decorations. The house feels tiny, but very festive :).

A few Christmas cards have arrived already but I’d stashed them til after Scarlett’s birthday so once we’d got the tinselly barbed wire type stuff dangling from the ceiling to hang them off we opened them. The usual snow covered church scene which arrived on 1st December from the elderly woman who Ady used to do gardening jobs for years ago, a medium-nice one from a boxed set of cards from an ex work colleague of both Ady and I from B&Q days. Do you remember doing that with boxed sets when you were at school? I used to get a box of 40 and sit and catergorise them into the 20 or so really nice ones, the 10 ok ones and the 10 crappy ones. The nice ones would have cute cartoony penguins, snowmen, santas or robins, the ok ones would be nice nativity scenes with smiling Baby Jesus, peaceful looking Mary etc. and the crappy ones would be things like a Christmas bell, or a single bauble or a robin (not a cheery cartoony one, a real looking one) perched on a branch, or three kings on camels. I’d then catergorise the people in my class I wanted to give each type to – the politics of giving the nice ones to the cool girls first, then the girls I actually liked got the ok ones and finally the people I didn’t like much at all but would rather make the point of giving them a single bauble card than no card at all got the crappy ones. Usually because class sizes then were around the 32/33 mark I’d be left with about 7 crappy ones which I’d issue to teachers. I still size up cards that have come from box sets (which most Christmas cards do although I now know them by their proper name of ‘packaged goods’ having done two Christmasses in card and gift retail – it’s a recent loss of skill that I can no longer ‘read’ the codes on the back of the cards and tell you how much they cost :lol:) to see how we fare in people’s Christmas card standing but suspect it is not the science it once was in school days and is altogether more a random thing based on our surname and people’s address book nowadays. The other thing I check is the order in which our names are written, whether people have used Ady or Adrian and Nic or Nicola and I award special bonus points to anyone who manages to spell all four of our names correctly and they move up the list next year. Although everyone we send cards to gets the same festive photo of Davies and Scarlett card mentally I know whether that is the cartoon robin version or the single bauble one.

Which leads me to the etiquette of exchanging cards with neighbours. The Thankyou Neighbours (and while I mention them could we all send a wave and a smilie to the Thank You Neighbours actually who I have not seen since speculating that they read my blog and know when I am about to leave the house, thus perpetuating my theory!) posted 3 cards through the letterbox last week – one to Davies, one to Scarlett and one to all four of us. There were stickers and different coloured pens used to write and adorn them and they do indeed feature cartoon reindeers, robins and snowmen. Posted on the same day was another hand delivered card which I assumed was a fourth one from them – perhaps thanking us for Christmas, or addressed to the cat or something. But no. It is not. It is addressed to the four of us (Scarlett is spelt wrong) and signed from ‘Annette’. But we don’t know anyone called Annette. I’ve never known anyone called Annette actually. I’m quite chuffed that I do now and not only do I know one I am on her Christmas card list because it means I can add real warmth to that joke about what you call a woman you can catch fish with. Except of course I have no idea who she is. I’ll ask Maureen, she’ll know.

Then tonight, while we were watching X Factor, and my, what an X Factor that was, I sobbed along with Barbie from Same Difference when she lost it at the end of that S Club 7 song, bless her, a card came through the door from Carolyn and Owen. They live opposite us, have done for about 10 years. We see them often and always hail them with ‘Hi Carolyn’ or ‘Alright Owen?’ depending on which one of them it is we see. We’ve been addressing Christmas cards to them for at least 8 years and actually it was in that first Christmas card exchange that we learnt their names. Both of them are ususuallish in that I don’t know any other Carolyns or Owens in real life. But it’s signed ‘love from Carolyn and Owen – your opposite neighbours’ which highly entertained me. And if I hadn’t already written their card I might be inclined to put in some identifying details about us in brackets after our names (‘man, woman, boy and girl with white and silver people carriers’ perhaps, or maybe ‘the family in the white loft conversion bungalow on the corner’).

Davies has been doing lots of charcoal and pastel drawings, he really is very good. He’s been doing lots of Shaun the Sheep pictures and they are utterly recogniseable, very animated and full of character. He tends to draw a series of pictures and use them as props to tell a story so he’s been bringing me lots of sets of three or four pictures and ‘telling me all about them’. He is very good at caricatues of people and things and adds in lots of incidental details like movement suggestion marks, musical notes or sound indicators etc. He has a real skill for taking a mental photograph of something and being able to manipulate it into other poses or situations. I don’t draw like that at all, I can do a very passable copy of something but wouldn’t be able to change it’s pose for example. Scarlett is the same, she can do a good portrait or copy of something by refering to it like still life but if you then asked her to make her cat (for example) sit instead of stand she would struggle with doing that, Davies would find it an almost effortless challenge. Interesting to watch and indeed chart the progress of things like full colouring of pictures with background details etc rather than endless sheets of paper with one or two main things. I think creating art from photos would be something Scarlett would enjoy lots whereas Davies likes to be given a theme or idea to interpret in his own style.

Everyone has been late to bed tonight (me included, but I’m about to go now) so although we have a plan to go to the cinema in the morning I’ll see what time we all get up rather than setting an alarm. In the afternoon we have an open house invitation round to some friends who are hosting a Lasting Impressions party, not that we have any intention of buying (I really like that stuff but it’s way out of my price range) but it’s a good chance to see our mates before Christmas :).