A Happy Christmas

Christmas approached in an accelerating rush of presents not yet, bought, not yet made, not yet wrapped; it caught the whole family wrong footed this year, even Middle Daughter, who usually starts making presents in October, was caught short by the reality of high school with exams and projects, and only started making her presents once school holidays kicked in – despite this she was ahead of the rest of us.

Youngest came to me the day before Christmas Eve and stated decisively that she needed go to the crystal shop in a tone that allowed for no negotiation ... so we created a window among the mad rush of Christmas Eve cooking and sped down the road to our nearby village of Philadelphia, where present salvation is to be found in the form of a glittering treasure chest of semi-precious stones, crystals, pretty jewellery, clothes, enough to solve any gift dilemma, as long as you don’t have teenage boys on your list (she had made fudge for her brother so that was OK).

Getting our tree is a whole family affair. We usually bring it in on the Sunday before Christmas Day – the Saturday is taken up with our summer festival and my SIL works in the week and is an enthusiastic tree-chooser and cutter so it would be unthinkable to do it without her.

This year she was on leave so we suggested getting the tree the week before to have it in time for the festival, but with one thing and other it didn’t happen, so the tradition of the Sunday before Christmas held true (to Middle Daughter’s secret relief – a traditionalist at heart).

This year’s tree was the one SIL had picked out already, tall and elegant it only just passed the raised stick test for height (any taller than that and even our ceiling is challenged). Carried home in triumph and set up in a tub full of bricks, roped to the wall and adjusted for uprightness, then it is over to me for the putting on of lights. This brings out the most irritable side of me, so don’t get in my way when I’m unwinding strings of lights from their coat-hangers, clambering up ladders and teetering there with broom outstretched to get them perfectly wound around the topmost branches.

Middle daughter is looking poised to take over these duties any time I bow out and did a fine job with getting the tinsel up high, she and Youngest doing most of the putting up of decorations. Son put up those ornaments nominally his, and disappeared back to a gaming conversation with friends on his computer.

Then Monday and Tuesday were both shopping days – husband having hurt his back carrying in the tree, so I did his share of driving around looking for wish list items as well as my own. I felt like a cave dweller out foraging all day for rare and desirable pieces of rock or berries, as I shuttled from specialist computer shop in the back streets to mega-store and shopping mall, eventually staggering home with a few hard-won prizes to go under the tree.

Apart from the brief foray to the crystal shop, Christmas Eve was spent in the kitchen, steaming up as the gammon simmered for slow hours, red onion marmalade for gifts cooked down, and building up the stripes of different colours in the jam-jar jellies, to the sound-track of Christmas carols and the despairing cries of kids trying to finish off and wrap their presents. By 4.30 when I had to ferry the girls down to take part in the Christmas play at Camphill, I hadn’t wrapped a single present, but other than that everything was ready.

Almost time to relax.

The play over, girls exchanged their gifts with their friends, and then had to be torn away from them and back to a quick supper and family Christmas carols, when we always have to sing our way through the entire book of carols. This left all the wrapping to be done from 9pm onwards, including Father Christmas’ wrapping (he needs so much help these days), so it was after 11 before the kids were quiet enough for us to at least pretend they were asleep and stuff their stockings, which they still insist on hanging at the end of their beds. And then collapse on the sofa in a daze of tinsel and sellotape.

The view from the sofa at almost midnight

Then the day dawns early, and stockings are opened, attended by Bracken and including a flurry of messaging with friends... now we know we have teenagers.

It turns out to be one of those precious cool Christmas Days, overcast with occasional showers of fine rain, this is a good thing in the middle of a hot dry South African summer, meaning we don’t have to do any watering, and that we can have the children’s favourite roast potatoes and veggies to accompany the turkey and gammon, instead of boring old salads.

My mother and the girls on Christmas morning, and George smiling too!

 And this year our lunch went smoothly, without last year’s drama of fire fighting, only enlivened by the sighting of a large cobra beside the bunny cage, which sent the snake catchers out in force just before the food was on the table. The snake went off and hid, was sighted again on Boxing Day and we’re still checking the  bunnies regularly to make sure there are two of them.

Crackers, too much pudding, a rustle of wrapping paper, movies and finding room for Christmas cake at supper time, family Christmasses at home are a treasured part of our family recipe book.

Happy Christmas, Everyone!  (especially Marcheline, who I know is reading, because she comments even if I haven't posted anything, just to keep me on my blogging toes :) )

Wishing you all a wonderful year ahead full of much joy, love and laughter.

Christmas Tree Lights, Candles and A Roaring Fire

Our family Christmas Day follows a fairly predictable pattern, so that by the time we finally sit down to a late lunch, I know it is just a matter of free-wheeling through the meal, a few more presents to open, before I can put my feet up on the sofa in a replete stupor and make up for the sleep deprivation of all the last minute present making, wrapping and stocking-stuffing that is Christmas Eve.

This year, Christmas morning was hot with hardly a breath of wind stirring. My sister-in-law cooks the turkey first thing over at her house, so we don’t have to turn our kitchen into a sauna with too much roasting and basting. I just have to glaze the gammon, make a couscous salad, finish the last stripes of the jellies and boil some baby potatoes with mint.

Stripey jellies are an entrenched family Christmas tradition

But my eyes are feeling heavy already as we finish the main course. It takes a minute for me to identify the smoke that accompanies the last few mouthfuls. Burning custard, no...not toast burning...not the oven left on...the bonfire smell is an immediate warning bell in our dry summer landscape.

It’s wafting in from outside and my husband heads swiftly upstairs, from where we have a 360 degree view of our farm, to see where it’s coming from. Usually it’s far enough away for there to be no need for immediate worry, but this time the smoke is rising from behind our trees on our neighbour’s farm right on the border of ours. The wind is starting to blow and its bringing the fire down the hill towards us.

Pudding is put on hold. Kids have to wait for the rest of their presents as adults switch into action mode. My husband and one sister head off in the 4x4 to see how serious it is, calling our Malawian farm worker as they go, who is luckily not too far away. The rest of us stand by, clearing the table, putting the puddings back in the fridge, until we know how things stand. The sight of the blazing red and green candles on the table is a bit too much fire for me and I quickly blow them out until that other blaze feels less threatening.

The drama unfolds quickly. The wind is sending the fire downhill, towards our neighbour’s huge expanse of shade-cloth, which starts not 50 m away from our house. Our border beefwood trees aren’t going to be much of a barrier, as they are likely to go up in a blaze themselves once the fire reaches the shade cloth. The fire brigade has been called but is not yet on the scene.

Simon arrives with three Malawian friends to help fight the fire and gets to work with our chain saw to cut down any trees too close to our border and create a better fire break. Our neighbour, who lives down the road on another farm, arrives with her father fresh from their Christmas lunch. Those of us still at home drag hoses around the house and start sprinkling all the trees and dry bush between the border and our house.

Smoke is filling the air now and there is a crackling roar from the fire which seems to be getting closer. The kids are inside the house, out of the smoke, reading their Christmas books, playing on Christmas computer and wishing that we could get on with pudding. The dogs and cats are also inside out of the way.

The fire truck at last - photo Patrick Heathcock

Taken from our fence with our Malawian friends holding the fire at bay - photo by Patrick Heathcock

The fire truck eventually arrives, our four Malawian friends work like Trojans. At one point I change my Christmas finery for old clothes and remember to cover up fair skin which has no sun screen on, before returning to my hose to continue misting trees and bushes, in case the wind veers a degree and brings sparks flying over our border trees to threaten our house, our children and our Christmas.

About two hours or so after the initial alarm, the fire is under control. They stop it just before it reaches the shade cloth, catch it before it jumps the track to our border trees. I put the hose down with relief and go inside to tell the children we can have pudding now. Eventually we collect everyone together again. My mother and two sisters-in-law have been hosing my SILs cottage which is also close to the border of the farm. The dogs are released to a smoky outside and we bring the summer pudding and jelly back out of the fridge, the now lukewarm Christmas pudding and custard with skin on top, to be attacked with unusual appetite, in our smoke-infused clothing, red-rimmed eyes and heartfelt relief to find our home and Christmas intact.

There are hardly any leftovers of pudding. Our Malawian friends came, smoke and all, and shared our Christmas table, drinking iced water and sampling summer pudding for the first time ever, then we sent some back with them to their wives, to thank them for sparing their men to us and letting their Christmas meals go cold. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate their generous and energetic help, as without them the fire would have spread far more quickly, perhaps before the fire truck made it. And thanks also to those Christmas angels who prevented the drama from becoming a crisis.

After that there was nothing more to do but fall into the swimming pool and soak the smoke out of our hair, before broaching our Christmas cake with a cup of tea in lieu of supper and watching the second half of The Family Stone, (our every year must-watch Christmas movie) all squashed onto the sofa with the kids, before an early night for all. A night spent by my husband with several wake-ups at the smell of smoke, going outside to check for any new fire, and by me dreaming of fire on the border and innumerable fire-fighters and neighbours to find food and first aid kits for.

I hope your Christmas was less dramatic and full of joy! Despite the drama we really did have a lovely Christmas, full of beautiful hand-made gifts from the kids, and lots of love and togetherness.

Joy to the World and many blessings on 2014!

The Colours of Christmas

Christmas colours in sunshine country! You no longer have to stick to the traditional red and green of mid-winter Christmases, but a new scheme of bright yellow, orange and red comes together all on its own. Sunflowers picked from the veggie garden, nasturtiums likewise, our everyday bright and cheerful plates seamlessly blending in.

Christmas Day was hot and sultry, so cold turkey, bacon wrapped sausages, gammon and salads were the order of the day. Followed by summer pudding, ice cream and a little tiny Christmas pudding just for tradition.

We still managed to be completely stuffed afterwards with barely any room for our traditional stripey jellies!

Now all the leftovers are finished, so I'm cooking a second gammon to eat cold for New Year's Day lunch - just to keep those Christmas flavours flowing.
And tonight we're celebrating with fillet on the braai. What about you?
Happy New Year everyone!

Christmas Preparations

I haven’t been feeling very Christmassey so far. The press of work to be completed before Christmas, the usual self-employed person’s dread of the financial dead season casting a shadow over the delights of Christmas shopping, have rather left me lacking in the Christmas spirit.

But now our tree is is up – a beautiful one that my sister-in-law has had her eye on all year for it’s beautiful rounded and bushy shape. We cut it on Sunday, with a cluster of cousins visiting from the US to join in the fun.

It just fits into the house, talking up almost half the width of our sitting room, smelling of pine and twinkling with lights, two sets at least, the third one gave up after one day and we haven’t managed to find the guilty bulb!

Youngest helping bake the Christmas cakes

I’ve just made the marzipan for the Christmas cakes (baked a couple of weeks ago) – seemingly vast quantities of almonds, sugar and eggs, that underline how much of a festive celebratory excess Christmas cake really is.

I always use Delia’s recipe and just leave out the almond essence, adding extra lemon juice instead, and it makes a lovely mild marzipan, that all but the most ardent marzipan haters (my husband for one!) like.

Talking of marzipan I rather love the old English word for it – marchpane. It reminds me of a favourite children’s book by Alison Uttley, A Traveller in Time, where a little girl slips back to the 16th century in the time of Mary Queen of Scots. In between plots to rescue the sad queen from captivity, she fashions an elaborate model of the family farmhouse out of marchpane, an image that has stayed with me to this day. I could never work out how she made such intricate models and detailing from marzipan, which in my experience crumbles to pieces so easily... she must have had a different recipe!

Middle Daughter with papier mache goo hands

Middle Daughter has completed and wrapped an impressive stack of home-made presents, including papier mache masterpieces, our son has made his cards and has decided to make origami figures as presents this year, Youngest has written a story as one of her presents, that she was laboriously typing out on the computer, painful letter by painful letter. I stepped in and typed it for her, to her dictation, and just need to work out how to get it printed off to form a real book!

I on the other hand have purchased a total of two presents and am relying on last minute inspiration and the fact that the large family will anyway swamp our children with presents, so the tree will look suitably abundant on Christmas Eve!

How are your Christmas preparations going?

Christmas Mumps

Christmas is like a hurricane, sweeping you up in a whirl and depositing you the other side among the debris, not quite knowing how you got there but drawing breath at last.

It smells like Christmas still, Christmas deconstructed, turkey stock simmering as the last vestiges of Christmas feasting are tidied out of the fridge. How can we have got through all that turkey already…and the gammon? Even the jelly is finished. The fridge looks way too tidy and empty.

There are presents still to buy or make but the momentum is gone. Our son’s last minute present making plans were thwarted when he went down with mumps on the Monday before Christmas. Lying on the sofa with a cool pad clutched to his chipmunk cheek he was in no fit state to be stirring lemon curd, or starting a production line of paintings like his sisters. He had just one present made and wrapped.

On the other side of Christmas he surfaced, with a new-found dislike of jelly, as it was the only thing he could eat for three days, and was finally able to make his lemon curd gifts. They are still languishing in the fridge, while he summons up the energy to wrap them and present them to his aunts – the gift-giving frenzy is over, along with the cast off wrapping paper, and the urgency is gone.

Now we are calculating the days until the girls can be expected to show signs of mumps too: +/– three weeks incubation = about when we are planning on going on holiday to the River with friends. So do we go and risk it, packing a large bottle of paracetemol syrup and a week’s supply of jelly, knowing that we’ll be a half hour drive from the nearest town down a bumpy dirt road?

Or maybe they could oblige and get it early next week, so they are starting to feel better by the time we go. Luckily we’ve already exposed said friends to mumps as our son had a sleepover with them just before he went down with it, so we don’t have to worry about sharing the germs!

The positive spin is that it is much better to get mumps before adolescence strikes, so really it’s in the nick of time for these eleven year olds, but our son didn’t find that very cheering while he was languishing on the sofa facing the bleak prospect of a Christmas Day spent unable to indulge in roast potatoes and a surfeit of pudding.

In the end he was able to eat the potatoes, his swollen glands having shrunk to a respectable hamster size, but after four days of not eating he could only manage four potatoes instead of his usual ten!

Christmas is Coming, Ready Or Not

Silent Night is echoing around the house, as the girls learn all their favourite Christmas carols on the recorder.

Paint smears over T-shirts indicate that some serious pressie creation has been going on.

Middle Daughter now has two bagfuls of home-made presents all totally independently made.

Son spends time alternating between computer and book and is relying on a last minute batch of home-made lemon curd to solve all his present dilemmas.

Youngest is steadily amassing her pressies, but is way behind her sister, though keeping her nerve and persevering.

And me? I’ve done the bare minimum of shopping, just enough to provide a present each per child plus the odd stocking filler and am following my son’s example and relying on a last minute painting spree to create the rest of my pressies. Inspiration thrives on adrenalin, I hope.

The Christmas cakes are baked and awaiting their marzipan and icing.
The tree is still growing up at the top of the farm until we go to cut it on Sunday.
The girls have built a stable but we have no figures as yet for the nativity scene. I had the great idea of making our own wooden figures, which fell by the wayside several weeks ago.

And the reason my blog has been such a bare and windswept space…there has been plenty of writing material but a total lack of energy to shape it and put it into words, as the last two weeks have held:
A wind-pummelled two night camping trip with our son’s class, where duct tape was the main element keeping the tents up and poles shattered left right and centre.
Production of the school annual newsletter where each year we are sailing teeth-clenchingly closer to the deadline – this year it was printed at 9am before school’s close at 11am…
Family over here from Australia and consequent feasting.
Son’s class play, where he excelled as cut-throat robber at the first performance and Zeus at the second.
My mother arriving from England for Christmas.
Our belly dancing end of year performance at our house, for which clear floor space was required, a scarce commodity even in our spacious abode.
Much juggling of work with all the above, which made me realize how much more time efficient I could be every week if pushed.

So I am thankful that the girls are keeping themselves so busy with Christmas preparations, churning out cards for me to send to family overseas, keeping the spirit of Christmas alive in our house, so that I can coast along in their slipstream and let the momentum gather in their wake.

Happy Christmas

Wishing you all a wonderful and joyful Christmas time!

This picture sums up a summer Christmas for me. A miniscule smidgen of cake consumed alongside copious slices of watermelon for a late tea, followed by a gentle stroll around the farm just after the sun had gone down. It was cool enough to have a hot Christmas lunch with roast potatoes, bread sauce and the whole caboodle, so we indulged mightily until we could scarcely move. I'm happy to say that we managed to make more inroads into the cake this morning, with the help of visiting family, and are dealing well with the leftovers.

The fridge should be nice and empty by the time we go off on holiday on Sunday. A week away at a house in Knysna, near beaches, lagoons and boats and more family... then two days on safari, for our first time ever, all courtesy of my mother who is staying with us now. We have to pack lightly with six of us in the car, but I'm going to find room for some of the art materials that I got for Christmas and have a play with paints and pastels.

The children got Twister for Christmas and so are now in a tangled heap on the ground, amid constructions of 'Planx' (another present that Dad has also been enjoying), and wearing sparkly princess jewels and dresses (not Dad though).

The star on top of the Christmas tree is bowing lower as the tree wilts slightly in the dry air. We'll leave it up when we go and come back to a needleless tree skeleton probably, but it would be too sad to take it down so soon. We get back on the 6th, so it will be the first thing we do when we come home, putting away the decorations and sweeping every last needle out of the house on the last day of Christmas.

In case I don't get back to my blog before then I'll say Happy New Year now too. May it be peaceful, prosperous and full of happy surprises!

Christmas Trees

At last I am starting to feel a bit Christmas-y. It's the scent of pine that does it. First of all we cut some branches of a wonderful, almost lemoney smelling, pine for the children's nativity scene, which has taken over the fireplace. It's way too hot to gather around a log fire here, so the fire place has been turned into a stage for Mary and Joseph, who are tortuously making their way day by day, painfully slowly, to the stable at the front. An angel is sitting on the roof with the baby Jesus. The plan was to suspend her from a wire on the chimney, which needed Dad's expertise to attach, and then lower her a tiny bit every day until she alighted on the roof on Christmas Eve. But she is quite happy lolling on the roof with the babe in her arms and Dad has been busy on other things, so there she has stayed throughout Advent.


We chose our tree carefully from the ones flourishing at the back of the farm. There were loads of big ones and loads of tiny self-seeded baby pines, but it took us ages to find a good shaped tree the right size this year. In the end we decided on a siamese twin tree. Two trees had grown so close together that they made one tree, so we cut them together and they are now looking festive, if slightly drunken from some angles.

The two dolls houses both got a tree this year. There were so many seedlings that we just pulled a couple up for the doll's house family to celebrate with.



We had our Summer festival yesterday, which was lovely, so now there is nothing else between now and Christmas. I anticipate a flurry of making marzipan and icing the cake, wrapping presents, painting the rest of my presents and finishing off last bits of work.

The other Christmassey scent of smoked gammon, which has been tantalising me every time I open the fridge, will pervade the whole house on Christmas Eve, when I am going to cook the hams, mingling with clove notes and cidery fumes, and we'll have them cold with salads and cold turkey on the day itself. Cinnamon will find its way into the couscous salad, aslo filled with mang and toasted almonds, so those traditional spices redolent of Christmas will still get a look in despite the hot weather.

Hope you are all having a wonderful lead up to Christmas!

Christmas Heat

Feeling Hot hot hot!
It’s 38 degrees C out there and was hotter yesterday – summer has come blasting in, making it hard to think of Christmas. Baking and spicy scents of cinnamon pervading the house just don’t really work when you are melting in the shade. Candles, firelight and warming spiced food are so much part of the Christmas atmosphere to me that it is hard to get in the mood sometimes.

Christmas carols waft through the house, shimmering like snowflakes: ‘earth stood hard as iron, frosty wind made moan’. They demand huge leaps of the imagination, as we swelter in T-shirts trying to think of a Christmas present to make that does not involve sewing felt – just thinking about felt makes me hot.

Christmas as a hot weather festival hasn’t really made it into my sub-conscious – here people take off for the beach and have big barbeques for Christmas, but it just don’t feel right to me! I need turkey and ham, Christmas cake and mince pies, candles and frosty carols... here’s wishing for cooler weather, so I can restore the illusion of Christmas festivities for my inner child!

Tinsel Alert

I received my first Christmas card today.

I know it’s still September – who is thinking about Christmas, apart from over-zealous sales teams and really super organized people (that is for my mother who I know is already preparing to come out and visit us this Christmas and so has started shopping already!)

My eight year-old daughter – that’s who. She has started producing a nice line of Christmas cards, with added decorations and notes.

I promised to find them envelopes (Youngest was creating her birthday invitations at the same time) but promptly forgot about it. This proved to be a perfect example of the benefits of idle parenting, because they then made their own beautifully decorated envelopes. Our paper supply is rapidly dwindling …

Wishes for 2008

It's time for New Year's resolutions again. I can't remember if I made any last year, but I do remember that we always used to make ones that were doomed to failure within a week and thus were discarded as a bad job for the rest of the year.

So this year I had another idea of what we could do to mark the change of years without over-facing ourselves. We're making paper streamers. On one side we write a thank you for all the good things that last year brought and on the other a wish for all the things we hope for in 2008. Then we'll pin them to a stick in our circle and leave them to flutter there, fading in the sunshine, dissolving into the rain.

This way they aren't resolutions that we feel bad about if we fail, they are wishes and we can keep on trying at them until we get close, or they can evolve through the year - there'll be no stark lines of writing to remind us of our shortcomings, as they'll have long ago weathered away, but our hearts will bear an imprint that is kind enough in its interpretation to allow us a whole lot of leeway and multiple tries.

At least that is the idea!

The children have already done theirs - their thank yous are simply for the happiness of last year and wishes for more happiness in the year to come, Middle Daughter's phrased as 'I wish for more happiness to come to earth', which touched me in a melting, gooey mother kind of way! Mine is filled with reams of detailed personal thanks and wishes - far less universal and altruistic than hers …

For all my blog friends I wish you a 2008 filled with love, joy and abundance, with plenty of new opportunities for creativity, work and play!

Puddings in a Hot Climate

Our Christmas Day feast has to end in far too big a choice of puddings! Summer pudding has become our traditional pudding for Christmas, made with our own berries, frozen specially so we have some left for the big day. And stripey jellies have become an essential component of the pudding spectrum - I have to start at least a day before to have time to build up all the layers and take great pains to get random colour combinations, so that each one is different! A real Christmas pudding always appears, but is usually barely nibbled at on the day, leaving me with a big bowl of brandy butter to find a use for. Has anyone got a clever way of using up brandy butter, once the Christmas pudding is finished? I'd love some ideas ..besides just eating it with a spoon on surreptitious visits to the fridge!

The end of an era

Father Christmas has officially been rumbled in our family.

I've been anxiously expecting it for the last three years, unsure how I was going to handle it, worried that our son would feel a sense of betrayal, that we'd tricked him. He was six the first time he heard rumours of parents putting presents in stockings and asked me about it. The younger girls were around at the time, so I placated him with a half truth and ever since then he has happily made cards for Father Christmas and left carrots for the reindeer.

He is nine and a half now though and I was beginning to fear the other extreme - him getting mocked at high school for still believing in Father Christmas!

I made the tactical error of buying some glittery mosaic pens, that they'd been admiring in the crystal shop a couple of weeks ago, to put in their stockings. This, combined with our son's friend and his family coming to lunch on Christmas Day, he who was bursting with the knowledge of the Father Christmas conspiracy, meant that before the day was out, just as we were waving off our friends, our three children went into a secretive huddle.

Middle daughter emerged and made a bee-line for me:

"Did you buy the pens and crystals in the crystal shop?"

I deflected her with a "What do you think?" and a quizzical look, not quite ready to start explanations in the middle of all the goodbyes.

A hurried confab with my husband ensued and we decided to wait for any more questions, rather than make them face bald truths that they weren't sure they wanted to know.

I felt a bit sad that Youngest had also been disillusioned when she is still only five, but I guess that is the way it goes in families where the children share everything, knowledge included.

Nobody asked questions at bed -time to my relief, but I couldn't quite relax, trying to work out an explanation that would make sense to them.

In the end the questions came the next morning, when I came through bleary eyed at 6.30 to find them all sitting on the sofa, not watching a video as usual, but individually playing with their favourite Christmas presents or reading.

Middle Daughter was the one determined to get a satisfactory answer. She repeated her question of the previous day.

I looked at them and asked if they wanted me to tell them more. A solemn "Yes" came from them all.

I launched into my prepared speech: about how St Nicholas was a real man who lived a long time ago, who started the tradition of secretly leaving presents for the children of his town around Christmas time. That after he died the parents decided to carry on his tradition. That the story of Father Christmas comes from him and is all about the spirit of Christmas, of loving and giving. That younger children have the whole Father Christmas story but when they are old enough to ask questions they are also old enough to understand what Christmas is all about. That Father Christmas may not be a real person but his spirit is out there - just like with angels, you can't see him. That even though parents have to do the actual buying of presents, the spirit of Father Christmas is still a part of it.

What amazed me was how comfortable they felt with the angel comparison - they could relate to that and it helped them understand.

Youngest has said a couple of times that she hopes she forgets so that she can enjoy it all next Christmas and our son would also rather forget and keep the illusion going. It is our seven year old Middle Daughter who, in the scientific spirit of investigation, keeps coming back to me with questions about whether I bought everything and was it Father Christmas who took their thank you cards.

All in all it was easier than I feared and I hope they manage to let it all settle into the nether reaches of their subconscious and enjoy their stockings next year too.

I'm wondering how long it'll be now till the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny get their cover blown!

Christmas Spirit

I've achieved a measure of Christmas spirit at last! I've finished the last bit of work, told my clients I'm having a break till New Year and I actually baked the Christmas cake yesterday despite the sweltering heat!

We always go and cut our tree on the Saturday before Christmas, so that everybody can be there. The week before, we stroll up to the top of our property, where there are innumerable self-seeded pine trees - alien invaders that it is our positive duty to clear - and we choose the prettiest small one to be our tree.

Yesterday we waited till the end of the day, when the heat was beginning to fade and inspected our short-list of trees. The thing about looking at a tree outside under the sky is that it always looks too small. Our house has high ceilings, but even so one year, the monster tree we'd lugged down the hill had to have a couple of feet trimmed from the base before we could stand it upright. This year we had to vote three trees and the adults managed to sway the kids towards the smaller one, that was a nice shape and a whole lot easier to carry. They were a bit concerned that it would be too small and not have enough room for all the decorations, but lo and behold, when we got it into the house, relieved to be carrying a lightweight rather than a back-breaking monster log, it was the perfect size!

Then comes the traditional sense-of-humour-failing struggle with the Christmas tree lights. It is always supposed to be the Dad who has steam pouring forth from his ears, as one bulb blows the whole string, but in our family it is me. I climb the ladder, keeping the kids in check in their eagerness to pile on tinsel and decorations, get the lights perfectly balanced, yell for extension cables and adapters to test them out. This time they worked fine, looked great and I let the children loose on the tree, while I cooked a belated supper. After supper I couldn't resist fiddling - I put the star on top of the tree and noticed that the bulb behind the star, which ought to highlight it, wasn't working. No problem, I thought, I'll simply change it with another one lower down that doesn't show so much. I promptly managed to tear the bulb wires loose from their socket and the whole string was rendered useless. AAARGH! I couldn't leave things alone till morning. I had to get it right that night, a half dressed tree is too a depressing a sight, so I spent an hour fiddling with bulbs, looking at all the spare strings of lights to find the same type of bulb as a replacement. Nope. This was the only string with that particular shape of bulb. There was no alternative. The children now long gone to bed, I tore off all their carefully arranged tinsel, took down the lights and started again. There was a certain grim enjoyment of all this, at last I got the tree to myself and once the lights were sorted I spent the rest of the evening, half watching Shall We Dance, but mostly re-arranging tinsel and baubles to my satisfaction.

I'm now sitting at the computer once more, this time printing off endless blank calendar pages, for the child sweat shop/elf calendar production team, who have decided that this year's presents are going to be drawn rather than sewn. Present making is a last minute business this year - whereas we usually start making things for Christmas in November and I have plenty of time to help sew, untangle knots and thread needles, this year I've been leaving the children to their own devices, while I try to be a WAHM.

Middle daughter has set to drawing with speed and a light touch and has made two and a half calendars of twelve drawings each, is working on a picture book with plans to make her brother and sister something too.


Youngest battles, with her abilities not quite meeting her high expectations of herself, but is persevering and has nearly finished one calendar. Our son is painstaking with his pictures but tires after one or two and dives back into his latest book He has decreed that this one calendar is for posting off to his name-parent (godmother), so has nothing to give the family here. I've dragooned him into agreeing to make lemon curd for the rest of his presents, as I can't see him producing anything more than a card before Christmas and we have two aunts, a grandmother and an uncle besides our little family to provide for.

I also need to make marzipan for the cake, start on making stripey jellies, wrap presents besides feeding us today and keeping the house clean ..so what on earth am I doing blogging now, when everyone else is too busy doing their own Christmas preparation to read it!

Happy Christmas to all my blog friends - have a lovely family time and may 2008 bring you all good things, peace and happiness!