Originally we were going to have 3 Christmases. First of all when the bubbles were bigger we were going to my brother for Christmas day - my parents were coming too. Husbands family were due to come over the Saturday before and then we were due to have another Christmas with a friend who is a single parent around New Year.
So I purchased one big fat turkey and 2 turkey crowns and put them in the freezer (chances of me ever being one of those people that queue for fresh meat around Christmas are zero!).
Then things changed. So we arranged for parents to go to brothers on Christmas day and we'd stay at home. We'd not be able to do husbands family, but we'd still be able to do friend for a mini Christmas.
Then things changed again. End result, my family had the biggest turkey for just 3 people that you can imagine. My parents stayed at home, husband met with his brothers individually to hand over presents and son and I spent week before Christmas dropping off other presents at doors and doing a runner so we didn't come in contact with people.
Christmas didn't start well, there's a thing going on where I live where you decorate your garden or a window and there's a map to follow to see all of the lights. As we didn't go to Wisley we decided to do on Christmas Eve, Eve. It rained, OMG how it rained. Last year I invested in an amazing raincoat it covers you completely apart from an inch around the ankles. I was the lucky one - the rest of my family were soaked to the skin - I was dry with the exception of an inch around the ankles where ALL of the rain had dripped down the raincoat and collected.
The lights themselves were OK, but if I'm going to be honest the best lights are the ones within 50m of my house. We've definitely done the lights better than the rest of the village. I dare say I'd have enjoyed it all if there were not buckets of water being thrown over me.
Earlier in the day we'd gone to the garden centre (tier 4 lockdown didn't start until turn of midnight Christmas/Boxing day). The idea was we'd buy a real Christmas tree for the first time so we could decorate it on Christmas Eve. Now normally they are packed to the rafters with trees near Christmas and are flogging them off for a fiver. Not this year - there was one tree left - the display tree - in a stand. I'm not one to let things go and so after a major row with my family who don't like to do anything that could be wrong we carried the tree to the check out.
As I suspected they were perfectly happy for us to take it. The only issue was the stand. This wasn't on sale and the stand it was in was one of their super duper ones. Frankly I wanted out of the garden centre quickly - so said that we'd just take the stand at whatever price. 'Whatever price' turned out to be £50. I paid for tree and stand suggesting to husband he may not want to look at our bank balance for a while. Of course, the downside is that we'll need to get a real tree for at least another 10 years to get our monies worth out of it. The darn thing is already dropping needles everywhere!
Christmas Eve is a busy day in my house with lots of traditions. Putting stars on the top of our trees (we now have 5 trees!), decorating a bush in the front garden and putting a key for Santa on it. Watching Micky and Donald's Christmas Carol, laying the table for Christmas - and this year doing us much preparation as I could so I wasn't cooking all of Christmas Day. Another part of our usual Christmas Eve tradition is to go out and get a stonking hot chocolate somewhere.
That wasn't going to happen this year and that's where the real tree came in. Son and I had spent a couple of weeks making tacky decorations out of loo rolls and finding other dodgy decorations that had been lying around for a while. Including the awesome angel that son made aged 5 for the local Christmas Tree festival (that didn't happen this year). So instead we decorated our highly expensive Christmas tree. It was actually lots of fun and against all the odds husband joined in as well. The only problem is that this enormous tree with all it's terrible decorations is still up - and likely to be up for at least another week.
Christmas morning came and we opened presents and had Christmas breakfast. I guess much the same as huge numbers of others. I was spoiled rotten this year - it seems that everybody went over the top with presents. I felt very guilty as I've been on furlough this year and so funds are extremely low. As a result I did the opposite and everybody got much less from me than they would do normally. Hopefully this will be forgiven - I'm not expecting effusive thank you letters though. I'll try to make it up to everybody next year!
Christmas lunch was... well frankly it was huge as we'd expected many more people (we lived off it on Boxing Day as well and then yesterday I made 100 Christmas curry's for the freezer). We also had enough crackers for 26 people - it felt like we were pulling crackers all day and we've still got several boxes left. I think I'll put them aside for next Christmas. We've also got a Christmas pudding that remained unopened (oh yes and a Christmas cake I've just remembered). I think I'll try to find space in the freezer as there's no reason why we can't do Christmas in July when hopefully we can all get together properly.
After lunch the sun came out - so we went down for a walk on the beach. So nice to get fresh air and actually see the sun shining. Then we got back home at 3.00 just in time for a whole family zoom call where we shared rubbish Christmas jokes, drank copious amounts of prosecco at each other and just nattered for about an hour and a half.
Once that was finished we did the usual Christmas thing of watching films, grazing on leftovers and fiddling with Christmas presents.
You know what - it was a really lovely day - in fact son said it was one of his best Christmasses ever - and as far as I'm concerned that's all I really cared about. Job done!
Do you know, one of the good things that's going to come out of this whole pandemic is the ability to get pleasure out of the little things. This doesn't mean I'm not desperate to get out there and do some big things and as soon as it feel safe I'll definitely be booking the Christmas markets in Berlin for next Christmas. But actually the simple things we did this year still made Christmas special.
Clearly I'm not in a position to bang on about how the simple things cost nothing - I already admitted I spent £50 on a Christmas Tree base!!!!! Apart from that though - there were no big financial blow outs - but then we're not really prone to big blow outs anyway - unless it's going to a nice restaurant or doing a trip somewhere nice (hmmmm, perhaps I am bloomin spoilt!).
Anyway, new amazing job with new terrible salary will mean I'll have to get used to the simple things. I have a hunch it's going to be worth it.
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