Saturday Roundup 29th December - Christmas (and the last post)

It's all over for another year. It's been fun, tiring, profitable and tasty.
We've eaten and drunk, we've visited and been visited, we've spent time together playing with our new toys.

Now it is time to put away our lively presents and say goodbye to Christmas.
I always feel a bit sad, but truth be told, I love the build-up more than the day itself. The planning and the expectation is usually more enjoyable than the reality.
As I was still feeling rotten on Monday, I went to the doctor and started a course of antibiotics to get me through the festivities.

Christmas Eve is one of my favourite days of the year. We made Christingles, visited my sister in law to exchange Secret Santa gifts and then attended Carols by Candlelight before hanging stockings.

R & M went gleefully to bed but the younger woke at 2.30 and went into her brother's room. I gently sent them back to sleep. I fell asleep again quickly and dreamed she got up again, with the result that I was much less forgiving she did come in to me at 3.40.! We actually started the day at 7.45.

We hosted Christmas Day and P cooked a gammon and a turkey crown for 8 people. Loads of food. I've had enough turkey now so I plan to freeze it as a pie filling.

My gifts were mostly unsurprising (I bought myself theatre tickets some time sgo snd gave P the bill) but my parents bought me a Samsung galaxy tab 3, which was a complete surprise.

The kids were happy with their electronic gadgets and I bought P vouchers for a local posh restaurant.

Boxing Day is traditionally spent at my parents' place with Mum's family but things were a bit different this year. 3 of my cousins have had babies in the last 2 years and none wanted to come because my brother has a large dog and the house is quite small. However my brother's estranged wife and her son (not my nephew, sadly) were there. It was quite a stressful day and I have made a mental note to invite everyone to ours next Boxing Day.

On Friday I took M, R and their 4 cousins to the local pantomime, Cinderella. It was a good show and we followed it up with tea at McDonald's. When we got home 2 friends visited to exchange gifts.

This made us all late to bed so we had a lie in this morning. In fact, some of us stayed in our pyjamas all day!

I've been dying to make a gingerbread house from scratch since I was g given cookie cutters for Christmas last year. The gingerbread itself was easy to make and work with (though I think it would taste better with golden syrup than black treacle) but I tried to take a short cut by using ready made decorating icing to glue it together..