Oh it’s all been dead festive round these parts today.
First thing my Dad popped round, mostly because he wanted me to wrap up a tin of biscuits for him to take to the nurses on the cancer ward at the local hospital. He has a friend who has had lots of treatment there this year and I’m unsure whether they were on behalf of her or simply from my Dad but it is probably the first and only Christmas gift he’s ever bought himself! He came round all pathetically and asked for Christmas wrapping paper, which once I produced he said bashfully ‘well I don’t know how to do it’ so I wrapped for him too – honestly, to have got to nearly 70 without ever having wrapped a gift probably qualifies for some sort of award – if he were on facebook there would be a group for it no doubt! Of course it’s unlikely that Dad will make it onto facebook given he still thinks the telephone (normal landline) works by some sort of black magic let alone all these internet thingys! 😆
I made a batch of mince pies – I’ve been rather ambitious in my quantities of home made mincemeat this year and have three vast tubs of the stuff to use but it seems to be going a long way. Worse than that I deliberately made it with beef suet (it’s what people would expect of me ;)) so it’s not suitable to give in nice glass jars to most people I know as a present, nor to make vast quantities of mince pies to give out either. If I still have it here next weekend I might do something charitable with it!
We mostly listened to music this morning – Davies loves playing Guess The Intro so I was playing various music saved to my laptop – he is bloody good at it! 🙂 A real ecclectic mix from Beach Boys to Take That to Mika to Neil Diamond. We had lunch and then we headed out to deliver Christmas cards. I post lots of them but keep back a few which are to people that increasingly we only really manage to see annually when we deliver their Christmas cards. So listening to Christmas music as we went our first stop was Bruce and Paula, our friends who married last year and have our three remaining hatched chickens living somewhere on their farm. They have a chocolate labrador called Ellie who Scarlett fell head over heels in love with when they took the chickens over there so the children spent a happy hour playing with her while we drank tea and chatted and caught up. We had a quick walk round the farm and the children managed to track down some of the chickens that live there and once again get the taste for farm life -one day, one day!
We managed to not have to get out of the car for any of the further deliveries with Ady and I leaping out to post them depending on who’s friends they were mostly and either shoving them through letterboxes and dashing away again, stopping for a brief doorstep chat or finding them not in – or in the case of one ex boss of mine discovering that without having written her house number on the envelope I wasn’t 100% sure of which of the row of similar looking houses she lives in!
I popped into the supermarket for a couple of bits of food (we have £6 left to last us until Thursday when I get paid when we’ll do a last minute dash for the presents we’ve not got yet for Christmas and then have to live on toast for January!) and then we came home for tea for the childen, watching The Lion Man on tv, which is so what Tarly wants to do when she grows up (work with big cats, not become a New Zealand bloke!) and frantically bid to win a Crazy Frog DS game that Davies has decided he wants for Christmas on ebay.
The children went to bed, we watched X Factor and ate pizza and now, having consumed altogether too much wine I am off to bed to sleep it all off!