Pictures!

Here is my blocked shawl and my little blocking buddy. Isn't he cute?


I am not going to knit anything except UFO's and one Christmas gift until the new year. I just don't have time.

Therefore I probably won't blog either. Christmas Day here will be spent either in the pool or lying prone on the sofa with the air-conditioning turned down as low as it can go.

On Christmas Eve we'll go to the open air mass at Market Square and sing Christmas Carols and have communion in the sunset. I would like to go to midnight mass and have homemade sausage rolls when we get home (like

Delia

does) but the children are too small.

Maybe this year we will open one present on Christmas Eve. We haven't done that before.


On Christmas Day we will eat:

Cold prawns w various dipping sauces for starter - I'm going a wasabi mayonnaise, a traditional seafood sauce and a vietnamese nuoc cham

Stupidly we'll still have roast turkey w sage & onion stuffing, baked ham, roast pumpkin and potatoes, wilted English spinach and bread sauce. If you haven't heard of bread sauce and you like stuffing you should really think about giving it a go. It's absolutely divine - see Delia for recipe.

Dessert will be sherry trifle which I will eat way too much of and we'll do christmas pudding with brandy butter and brandy cream even though I don't think anyone likes it much.

There will be cherries and nuts and shortbread.

There will be beer and wine and port and coffee and petit fours.
There may even be some frangelico and glayva later in the evening day.

We will play Neil Diamond's Christmas carols (shut up I don't care how daggy it is), some choirboys carols (I like the St Martins in the Field recordings too Glacia - I've even been to a few recitals there) and some modern ones. I hate 50's style jazzy carols, I only like proper religious ones and popstar ones. Frank Sinatra and the like I can't stand. Sorry Bing.

All this on a day which could be 40deg C. (V V hot in anyone's language.)

We used to walk down the beach with the cricket set and play an extended family game of rounders in the late afternoon, but since mum and dad moved we can't walk to the beach any more. Chateau le huge mortgage has a pretty big pool in the back yard so we make good use of that instead these days.

The kids rip open their presents and I always think we got them too much. Usually the cheaper things amuse them for the longest.

Mum and I usually have an argument over the food. Dad usually goes to sleep with the kids crawling on him on the couch after lunch.

I love it, but I am always glad it is over. Maybe I'll do a little pictorial this year, for the blog.

Happy Christmas all of you