Tag: Christmas & Advent

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creating Christmas * day 22

The Christmas tree

I can hardly believe it is day 22 today and I still have a few tasks left to do; just little things, but don’t little things always take the most time.

Thank you, for all the kind comments, any helpful suggestions always welcome here!

I couldn’t write each day about all the things that make a Christmas, without including the Christmas tree. I would think it is the one thing that most people have at Christmas even if they have no other decorations.

DH and I decided against a real one this year. It is only the second time in our 49 years of marriage (soon to be the big 50). The other time, was last year when we were so busy at home after spending so much of the year selling our cottage, we just didn’t have any energy left to go out and buy one, so we rummaged in the loft and found a very ancient IKEA one that my daughter left behind when she moved out.

It has made an appearance again this year. We will be away for Christmas so in a way it made sense. It has been patiently waiting in the corner of our living room for Master Freddie to come and decorate it, and I must say he made a fine job, though my heart was in my mouth a few times when I heard the chink of my delicate, glass vintage baubles (some of which must be as old, if not older, then me.

He insisted we had a star on top, and not one of the angels we usually have.

So we made a star from some gold glittery card. It might be the only thing I might swap out, when he is not looking, as I do like my little fluffy angel.

After the tree we attempted to put the marzipan and icing on the cake. I only do the top in a flat ready to roll fondant and then cheat a little round the sides, with one of those old fashioned paper frills.

With the left over scraps Freddie made a snowman. I think he did very well, and managed to get most of the black icing onto the snowman and not himself (though he did go home quite a shade of pink from a red felt tip pen he had used for doing some colouring)

The snowman will no doubt take his place amongst the rest of the cast when all the grandchildren get together on Christmas Eve to put the decorations in place on top of the cake. It has become quite a tradition over the years, and this year all four of them will be giving a helping hand. Each year, the same Christmas characters are placed on the cake, but all end up in different positons to the year before. They have great fun doing this and it saves me a job.

This picture below is one of the previous years – as you can see it gets a little crowded some years, but I just love their creativity. I have bought a new Santa this year as the old one is looking rather jaded now and I hope the snowmen aren’t too worried about the new snowman on the block.

Just as I had my hands on the rolling pin today I had a call…not from mum this time, but her main carer. It appears that mum has a crack in the toilet seat on her commode and although the carer had mentioned it to my sister two weeks ago, it had been overlooked. Not surprising as my sister has just been moving house. I had no idea which body provided the commode when she returned to her own home from the care home two years ago. A quick call to social services at Teeside and I was given a number for Community Equipment Services ( commode department) ….no just joking there!

They will send one out tomorrow – quite a Christmas present for mum – not sure who the lucky person will be though that has to fit the new seat – I rather think it could be DH on Boxing Day. I won’t tell him, might spoil his Christmas.

I spoke too soon about mum. I had a call at 4.45am . Like most people I was fast asleep and being rather disorientated at the rude awakening, I didn’t get to answer quick enough, so it went to voicemail and mum left a message. I thought something terrible had happened, and it had according to mum…firstly, she was irrate that it was ‘leave a message’ which she hates and then said perhaps I could tell her if Vera was on TV tonight. I rang her straight back and told her the time, she hadn’t realised it was the early hours and said she must have fallen asleep straight away when the carer put her to bed and left a 7 o’clock.

I am hoping for a better night tonight.

I will leave you all with another picture of the Advent calendar as most of the windows have now been opened and it is looking much more colourful.

Once again, I am just in time to post this before I fall exhausted into my bed. Tomorrow, is the last serious attempt to get everything done and ready, and will include some packing (something I have done very little of this year), so I might be a tad rusty.

With the Christmas tree in place, joyous carols singing away in the background, the cards made and in the post, the cake iced and the handmade gifts delivered, tomorrow, will also be the last of my creating Christmas posts – so what could go wrong so close to the finish….mum perhaps?

Back very soon x

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creating Christmas * day 21

The handmade gifts, part 2

It has been like Santa’s factory here today. I finally made the last of the gifts and today it was the gingerbread stars. It sounded quite easy, but in fact because my mind kept wandering I made a few mistakes here and there; nothing too drastic that couldn’t be fixed, but annoying all the same.

Instead of getting the ready roll gingerbread again I decided to make my own as I wanted it to be more gingery than the bought one….my first mistake – even though I added more ginger than the recipe, I still think I could have added more.

As always with my gifts I have a vision in my head of what I want the final result to be. I must say halfway through I thought it might all be going wrong but in the end I think they turned out close to what I had in mind. You will see the finished results below.

The first step was to cut out hundreds of small stars (well not quite, but it seemed like it at the time). Even this was tricky trying to keep their shape and stop them looking like starfish with wonky points.

I cooked the first batch to the times the recipe stated but I thought they were a bit too crisp and I wanted them a little softer. So I reduced the cooking time for the next batch to 8 minutes and that did the trick.

The next step, once cooled, was to dip in dark chocolate…

….then add some pretty gold sprinkles.

A second batch was dipped in white chocolate….

…..and a few had white chocolate laced over the top.

Once dry, I carefully filled one of the lovely Christmas glasses I had bought specially from Sainsbury’s.

…and repeated three times…

Packaged in cellophane, added a tag and voila!

So now my gifts to my friends are complete: one calendar of local scenes, and a glass filled with gingerbread stars.

Tomorrow, I will deliver them and I can turn my attentions, once again, to the final bits and pieces. Master Freddie will be coming Monday or Tuesday, so all the presents will have to be hidden from sight again.

Mum managed to ring a few times today when I had my hands full of sticky gingerbread dough. She times it well! She doesn’t seem to able to grasp the fact that it will be Christmas in a few days time and also asks over and over if we will be going up on Christmas Day. We have been round it all so many times, and not only me, but so have the carers, and I daresay my sister will have had the same questions.

On the whole though she has been remarkably good in the last few days and there have been minimal phone calls from her. The worst one being her call for help as she had lost the sound on the TV whilst watching Sense and Sensibility. She had obviously pressed the wrong button on the remote as it had changed programs and she had got Shrek on the screen suddenly. Even mum knew the difference! Trying to talk her through the steps to get it back took half and hour by which time Sense and Sensibility was almost at an end!

I expect when my sister says to take a jumper and a bucket on Christmas day in case of heating failure and roof leak in her new home (it is by all accounts a bit of a wreck), she may not be joking.

It won’t be the first strange Christmas…we have had some unusual Christmases in the past which are documented either on this blog or my previous one. When my daughter and her husband worked in a village pub near Masham we had our family Christmas dinner there whilst it was closed to the public. We had the whole pub and restaurant to ourselves and a room each for the night. Catering on such a large scale was much easier in the professional kitchen than it would have been trying to do it at home and, of course, as daughter was then married to a chef it was all prepared and on time.

It was a good Christmas and the men all loved it as they had a pool table and the bar all to themselves.

The other crazy Christmas day was when my MIL was in a care home in Shrewsbury and we went to spend Christmas day and Boxing day with her. We had decided this particular year not to have dinner in the care home with her (don’t ask me why as we usually did) so because all the cafes are closed on Christmas day DH and I had our Christmas dinner (actually cup a soup) in a car park somewhere in Shrewsbury, complete with a camping stove and some very funny looks!

Well that is me finished for the day…just time to press publish before day 21 is over and then time for bed I think. It was exceptionally dark this morning being the winter solstice. I was glad to be warm and cosy in bed and lingered far longer than I should have done, especially as those stars were calling out to be made.

So what is left to create for Christmas now…well I hope you might drop by and see.

I hope all your plans are going well, back soon x

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creating Christmas * day 19 and 20

The handmade gifts

Each year, I try to find some time to make homemade gifts for a few of my friends. We only exchange small, relatively inexpensive, gifts at Christmas, but they are often the most delightful.

A few years ago I bought some desktop calendars for 50p in the sale after Christmas from Sainsbury’s. They came on a gold stand and although the calendars would be out of date by the following year, I had the idea to make my own from photos I had taken in and around the village. I made these 2023 Calendars for my friends to give for Christmas 2022, you can read about it here.

Last Christmas, one of my friends told me how disappointed they were that I hadn’t made the calendars again for 2025, so I thought I would have a go at making them again for this coming year.

With this in mind, I have been taking a few photos all year around the village, documenting some of the everyday scenes I come across and searching out any interesting places or events to put on the calendar. It is always interesting to see if they can guess where the places are, and like any good puzzle I put the answers on the last page.

It does take a while to process these; editing photos and typesetting the dates for the month (and hopefully not making any mistakes!), so it usually takes me a good two days to complete them. I have of course obscured the name of our village from title in the photo!

All that is left now is for me to package them up in cellophane bags to keep them clean and then I can do the second part of their gift, either tomorrow or perhaps Monday. It will involve some food so I cannot make them too ahead of time.

As far as other Christmas preparations are concerned, I have been washing and DH, bless him, has been running away with the smoothing iron! Presently, he is on ‘cheffing’ duties and what a help that is.

Just to mention, for anyone that has been waiting for me to post the Festive Nut Loaf recipe it is now up on the drop down menu and at the moment also on the header strip.

It is certainly all downhill to the big day now, I am wondering if I have forgotten to do anything. x

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creating Christmas * day 18

The Christmas lights

“The light shines in the darkness” John 1:5

One of the best things about the darker nights is everywhere is aglow with festive lights and candles. I do like a bit of sparkle in the garden, but this year we haven’t got our Christmas trees to decorate: one of the potted ones had reached a height far too big for our tiny garden so we gave it to someone to plant on their large 2 acre garden. The smaller one turned brown in the hot weather when we had to limit our water use because of the drought in the local reservoirs, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t revive it.

I bought a string of warm white lights for DH to wind around the branches of the amelanchier tree. Not an easy exercise and even now when it is lit of an evening we can see where adjustments are needed – though if this rain continues that might not happen and we will have to live with it being a little cockeyed this time around!

Whilst browsing the Argos catalogue online for the string lights I spotted the ones in the photo below and they are also warm white, battery operated on a timer, and even better they were reduced.

The little flower bulbs on the end of a flexible stalk do look pretty amongst the foliage in my two wooden troughs under the window in the front garden.

I do like to see everyone else’s garden lights; at one time when our children were young we would pile into the car one night after tea and do a tour of the neighbourhood and secretly award people first, second and third prize and a highly commended (for anyone who had obviously tried hard). Of course there were fewer people putting lights out at all back then; our own cul-de-sac has since exploded with light shows, though I am always glad I don’t live next to the flashing ones.

This year we have had to seek out battery operated lights because we recently had a new electric garage door fitted and it clamps shut very tightly with the floor so running a cable outside from an indoor socket underneath the door is no longer an option. I expect fitting an outdoor socket will be another task for DH in the new year.

Meanwhile, inside on the mantlepiece, I have quite a minimal look at the moment of pine cones and one or two favourite cards, and they are set off with the tiny lights threading their way through. I will probably swap this over for more Christmassy decor when I get the box of treasures out.

With all this light shining amongst us how can we fail to rejoice in the Christmas season.

If you think you are missing days 16 and 17 then you are quite right.

Day 16 – Tuesday, we had our hair appointments in the morning (need to look a bit spruced up for the day), then shopped the rest of the day buying the last of the food and inbetween we hand delivered a few cards to save on postage. Shopping at the moment is just too exhausting.

Day 17 – Wednesday, I went to Master Freddie’s school Nativity play. He was a star (in both sense of the word!) It was a modern musical Nativity called – ‘Lights, Camel, Action’ and included the whole primary school. He is at a new school now since the move, with only 120 pupils, and it is the first time I have been able to go and see him in anything as his previous one limited the audience to parents only. They had 3 showings, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to accomodate everyone but half the children were away ill and others had to play 2 parts to cover. They all did marvellously and I so enjoyed it….not so sitting on those tiny chairs!

Welcome to my new readers – I hope you are enjoying following along whilst I create our little Christmas here. I have still plenty of tasks to do and hopefully, I will get to blog about them in the next few days.

Back soon x

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