Gifts...

The weather is incredible at the moment - much more like we used to have in December when we used to come on holiday and be the nutter tourists in shorts walking around the Old Town on Christmas Eve doing some last minute shopping whilst my Dad would be hunched up with a jumper and coat on muttering away that it was cold!!!  How times have changed!!  In the interim the winters have become progressively warmer and wetter, much wetter and that led to a miserable three, sometimes four months, when we hibernated and coped with water damage to the house.  Apart from the two days of torrential rain in the early part of last week the weather since has been glorious and the forecast doesn't show much change for the next week if not longer.  Feeling lucky that we are free to walk and get some fresh air we ventured down to the cemetery and checked on Dad's grave which is fine save for some of the lettering which needs to be re-blacked and for which I have pens but forget to put in my pocket!!

The roads in the village have now opened although not all the work has been completed so it makes going to check the post easier although there seems to be little point at the moment because there is a massive mountain of mail backlog in the UK and some mysterious black hole for post destined for Cyprus as things which were sent out weeks ago have yet to make an appearance - I seem to have a load of stuff sitting around in Germany - I wonder if my order for some Bridget Jones knickers is being held hostage as part of the Brexit negotiations - maybe Frauline Angela has taken a shine to them!!

We hadn't expected anything but were super excited to receive our long awaited parcel from John's sister, my lovely sister-in-law Janice (I have two sisters-in-law and Wendy is lovely too!).  Inside was a fabulous selection of hand-made masks and a veritable plethora of little Christmas wrapped gifties which was so kind of them and, looking at the postage, incredibly kind of them to send because sending parcels via the Royal Mail requires some sort of lottery win.

On the subject of gifts I was super thrilled by a recent culinary inspired hand-made present - some freshly preserved Kalamata olives and a second jar of Grog (the magnificent elixir which the Danes use to mull their wine).  No photograph of that jar as this was pressed into immediate action as I was on a cooking fest today getting prepared for Christmas and already had some mulled wine on the go which needed this particular je ne sais quoi!