12th night - taking down the Christmas decs

I have been quite active on Instagram over the Twixtmas period, I found it a good outlet to post a few pics and not have to provide any context other than a few #hashtags.  I was a bit surprised by the number of people posting pics of their Christmas Decs getting put away, some even before the 31st of December.  I am a traditionalist and to me the decs stay up until the 5th of December and only then do we take them down.  I am not saying they all survive to the end, we have already had a few drop off the Christmas tree and the tree itself has some distinct bald patches!  For various reasons it has been a few years since we had a real tree and I had forgotten just how much they drop the needles combined with we haven't taken the correct care of it. The accompanying photos were taken when it freshly decorated, so no bald patches should be visible!

An ex- colleague always had a family party on 12th night to mark the end of the Christmas period and everyone brought all the odds and ends of leftover  food and booze to use them up. There seem to be such a hurry of social arrangements in the run up to Christmas so it makes a nice opportunity to catch up with everyone. Although I believe there was one uncle who needed to be steered firmly towards the door at the end of the night as he had something of a reputation for outstaying his welcome!

I am quite please with my lack of Christmas leftovers, 1/2 a packet of ginger spiced biscuits and an unopened box of biscuits for cheese, this was not due to some carefully thought out plan as such.  My daughter hosted us for Christmas dinner, however, I ended up buying the food and cooking it on her new swanky range cooker (the rest of the room was like a building site and the only running water was in the utility room next door).  She had booked an online shopping slot and shoved a few items in the basket to "save the slot", we had gone through together and worked out what we needed, unfortunately, when she went in to update the basket the next day the order had already been sent to the despatchers and couldn't be replaced so had to be cancelled. It was Mum and Dad to the rescue and we battled our way round the supermarket, I focused just on what we needed for Lunch, snacks for the evening and a good old full english for brekkie on Boxing day with enough turkey left over for sarnies it would be criminal to waste the cranberry sauce.

I hope you had the Christmas that you wanted and said goodbye to 2016 taking the good stuff with you and leaving the bad stuff behind.

I would love to hear if you have already packed Christmas away or are you waiting to take it all down on the 5th Jan,

... Christmas countdown Days 7 and 8

The last of the catch up blogs and it does mean that you get double jokes today get ready for a big groan! Oh and I get double chocolate :)

Just a little over 2 weeks left to the big day and I still haven't even written a Christmas card yet, not a huge task I am glad to say and one I normally like to get done in the first week of December.  I have promised mince pies to two different sets of people for this week so I must get those done either today or tomorrow.

We did have a lovely festive moment on our weekend away, it is something of a ritual when we go to the North Norfolk coast to make a visit to Cromer and more specifically to take a walk on the pier and that includes popping into the cafe/bar at the entrance to the theater at the end of the pier.  It was incredibly windy so a hot chocolate and a warm mince pie was just the thing, Christmas songs were playing and it had been really well decorated a combination that put me right into the Christmas spirit.

Photo shoot piccys are Ribbon for the 7th and Baubles for the 8th

I think this is technically known as an embarrassment of ribbons, firstly because they are in a bit of a state and also because I have so many of them! I like to get as many uses out of them as I can.

Without all my "re-use" ribbons things look a lot neater

Day 7 and 8 with a nice haul of chocolate and the inevitable jokes, brace yourself, I know its been a while but here we go.....



"Why does Santa like to wear bells?"

"Because he love a good bell-y laugh!"



"Knock Knock"

"Who's there?"

"Mary"

"Mary who?"

"Mary Christmas"