Christmas is coming...

Oh the weather outside is frightful so we had set the day aside to trim up the house in readiness for Christmas.  We keep saying that we are going to be ruthless but end up buying more each year - no idea why but I guess the house evolves and so the decorations evolve with it.  We both love Christmas and it could so easily just pass as just another day if we didn't try and make it special.  It isn't about the presents or the money that is spent it is about being together and being happy.

We have several boxes of decorations which we store in the 'loft' - the space around our water tank and we try and put them back in some sort of order so that each year their locations will be obvious and the job quick but some hope of that - we have moved furniture this year so this has left us with a conundrum!!!  This is also the recipe for a full and frank discussion in our household - apparently we don't row although if you were eavesdripping you might refute that statement!!

John concentrates on the 'high up' stuff and so I like to have free rein on the tree decoration.  Now bearing in mind that this is a dinky little thing that some years I have been known to cling film and John complete with decoration it shouldn't take long but I have been reading upon the art of good Christmas Tree decoration and this involves putting teeny tiny baubles at the top and then working down the tree so that the largest ones are at the bottom.

I started like this and John passed by and commented "the ones at the bottom are too big" and I threw my toys out of the pram!!!

Disgruntled I decided to go 'off-piste' and throw caution to the wind and throw the rule book out of the window!!  The next time John passed by he actually said it was looking nice - grrrrrrrrrr!!!!!

This year we have John's new light fitting over the dining table and so it got the Wiseman Winter Wonderland treatment!!!  These are the balls and decorations that John deemed too big to go on the tree - he is probably right and actually they do look ok handing from the light fitting.  I had some Christmas wax melts infusing the lounge with their scent and a nice candle on the go - we didn't realise though that is was just below some silver artificial poinsettia flowers which suddenly started to smoulder!!

Once the decorations were completed it was present wrapping time.  I didn't think we had much but it took several hours to finish by which time my feet had gone to sleep because I had been sitting on the floor.  We have a few things for Mum to open but this evening was her main Christmas Present.  We had bought her tickets for Nutcracker on Ice which was being held in Paphos at the new Markidieo Theatre.  I am really worried though because the tickets were not cheap - the cheapest were 40 euros each and the company I bought them from suddenly stopped advertising them and another company was marketing the event.  I had got four tickets for mum and her friends and I had visions of them pitching up and someone else sitting in their seats.

We eventually got as much as we could done and I cannot believe that when I go down to Emba tomorrow to make the Boxing Day pasties with Mum that John has given me a list of things we need from Jumbo to complete his grotto!!!

He will say that he isn't into Christmas but I think he is worse than I am!!!

Our house comes into its own in the Winter - it is so comforting and cosy - as Andrew Kailou said - it wraps us in a great big hug - I am so grateful for this because Winter no longer fills me with dread.  Yes we had a bit of a leak on Monday but at least we knew why and we knew how to fix it.  On that subject there was activity at 3a today - someone is supposed to be moving in on Saturday - I do hope for their sake that the rain is being kept out - that certainly wasn't the case last year.