Christmas Day 2014

 

Happy Christmas, everyone!

I hope you’re all enjoying the holiday season: we definitely are – in fact, if we continue to enjoy it to quite this extent, I’m pretty sure I’m going to need a whole new wardrobe, preferably containing only items with elasticated waists. Of course, I COULD just consider stepping away from the Chocolate Orange for a while, but that would be totally un-Christmassy, wouldn’t it?

Our celebrations always begin on Christmas Eve, which also happens to be Terry’s brother’s birthday, so we spent the evening with Terry’s side of the family, before heading to my parents’ place, where we stayed until yesterday evening. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may recall that my mum’s Christmas table-dressing is legendary, and that every year she decorates the table around a different theme. This year’s theme was words/books, so we had Scrabble place-settings, a book tower (which she found in a second-hand store, and re-painted herself), and hand-made paper decorations, printed with the titles of some of our favourite books, and, of course, blogs. Ahem.

(I suspect I may be partly responsible for this theme, because ever since I mentioned that 2015 would be the year I finally wrote my best-seller, my family have all been excitedly wondering what I’ll wear on the talk-show circuit, and if I’ll be able to introduce them to J.K. Rowling. Let’s hope those 424 words don’t disappoint, huh?)

Once the table had been admired, we moved on to the feast:

We don’t always go for the traditional turkey dinner at Christmas, but this year was an exception, and it was amazing. Before long we were all absolutely stuffed, but there was one more surprise in store, in the shape of this fabulous cake which my dad made:

‘Hot Igloo’, for the uninitiated, is the name of our business – apparently my dad had seen an igloo cake in a shop somewhere, and considered buying it, before thinking, “What the hell: I’ll just make one myself!” And he did. Isn’t it amazing?! (It tasted as good as it looked, too…)

My Christmas day dress was Boden’s ‘Beatrice’ dress, which I snapped up in the sale last week, thinking it would come in handy both for Christmas day itself, and for any other holiday parties that present themselves. For now, though, I mostly just want to do this:

Enjoy the rest of the weekend, everyone!