Due to the very untimely passing of my wonderful Aunt prior to Christmas, my mother made her way to Scotland to be with the family and left me with the instruction, "to ensure that our family this side of the world had a lovely Christmas". So now being seconded into the Chief Christmas Fairy role,I promptly seconded hubby into my role of Mini Christmas Fairy and Dad into Chief Christmas Elf. Dad arrived down from Botswana on 21st December and was immediately whisked away on a boys night out by Grant, his brother & father, I honestly only got to speak to my Dad for 10 minutes before he was hot footing it out to wherever boys go on boys nights out (I think it is best not to ask). Due to fact that all my in-laws were going to be away for Christmas we had them over on 23rd for present swapping. Glen & Debs brought a ham, I made Christmas mustard when I got home from work to accompany the ham and we ate it on fresh rolls with salad. I then spent the 23rd running around like a chicken without a head getting the last of what I needed. I didn't quite manage to do everything on my list so I outsourced half the list to my Dad and the other half to Grant and they promptly went off on the 24th and got everything on the list (except for Paxo stuffing, as they were sold out, however I had a box of it in my pantry, so wasn't concerned, how wrong I was).
Christmas eve was spent setting the Christmas table, wrapping the chipolatas in bacon and boiling the ham in coke and then glazing it so all I would have to do on Christmas day was crisp up the crackling under the grill. All set for Christmas, we made our way down to our local Italian restaurant and had a lovely meal. Having had made the decision earlier that we were going to do Christmas dinner instead of lunch I woke up at a leisurely pace on Christmas day (there is advantages to having a teenage daughter, they sleep late).
We woke up to a huge pile of presents that Santa had very kindly delivered during the night. Donna & Jason arrived, I served up a Christmas brunch of croissants, cold meats, cheeses, pancakes, chicken skewers, muffins, yoghurt's & bagels, which was set to keep us going till dinner time. Jordy played Christmas elf and handed out all the pressy's. We were all pretty emotional with Mum not being there. I was spoilt rotten by absolutely everyone, Jordy & Grant got me the 3rd Professor Layton Game for my DS and a Kenwood food processor with all the bells and whistles (this was quite fortuitous as when I opened the stuffing, I found very unwelcome weavels in it, so I ended up making a stuffing from scratch using my food processor), Donna and Jason bought me a beautiful Ritzenhoff champagne glass to add to my collection, it has the prettiest butterflies all over it. I then opened the pressy's from my Mum and Dad, the first of which was a picture of me done by an artist in Zimbabwe, what a strange feeling to open a present and see yourself staring back at yourself. It is done so well, the artist even got my cotton wooly hair down pat and by the time I opened my string of pearls from Mum & Dad, that was me finished, tears were streaming down my face, Dad & Jordy's too. We then spent the rest of the day playing with our pressy's, swimming and mucking about. The entire meal (Turduckin included) came together beautifully and we sat down to a lovely dinner. Just after we had our main meal Grant set off the hugest poppy thing that proceeded to spew an enormous amount of confetti all over the table, and floor, it was absolutely everywhere. Grrr there went my beautiful table decorations. After cleaning up we moved outside to play games on the patio and much hysterical fun was had by all. All in all a really successful day, we just missed Mum ever so much, however she was needed far more by the family back in Scotland.
Our thoughts and prayers are with them all. Merry Christmas everyone.
Till next time
xoxo
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