So the other day you got me all trussed up like a turkey. This one’s just keepin’ it real.
Ding dong merrily I must be high. Also known as ‘putting up the Christmas tree’. from Kim at allconsuming on Vimeo.
Category: Christmas
Christmas Scenes
Christmas starts the Sunday before Christmas for us when we head south to my Dad and Stepmother’s for Christmas with them and the extended family. This pic is my Dad, stepmother S and all their grandchildren.
The annual mixing of the Christmas pudding. Mum has a stash of threepences and sixpences so everyone got a turn mixing and wishing as they stirred in their coins.
The pud as it primed to be wrapped in cloth and cooked for five hours (with a following four hours on Christmas Day).
Christmas morning – Grover has just woken up here so everyone gathered around to see what Santa had bought him.
A train! What a surprise! All the boys looking resplendent in pjs.
Both the little boys got trains from Santa, as they requested. (But not Thomas the Effing Engine. PROGRESS PEOPLE, PROGRESS!)
Oscar had asked Santa for a WWE Xbox game. That Santa, he knows how to deliver. At the moment it appears all our ridiculously ginormous TV can play is either this wrestling game or the cricket. I am not feeling the love.
Felix in his element, constructing something – a bionicle? Some lego?
You know, Thomas the Effing Engine better watch his back, eeoreeors are giving him a good run for his money.
Party hats!
Granpa! (My FIL)
Grandmama (My mum)
Nanna, Uncle M, Uncle J (My MIL, BIL and his partner)
Happy HAPPY!
The tiny turkey breast which turned out to not be so tiny. Still have leftovers from it. I stuffed it with Italian sausage, breadcrumbs, pecans, onion and heaps of parsley, tarragon, oregano and sage (from the garden!). The gravy I made from the roasting pan juices was indescribably good.
Bread sauce, a first for me and one of those, why the hell don’t I make this all the time kind of moments. Seriously good and so damn easy. I also made my own cranberry relish which was equally sublime. Thank you Nigella for both those tasty delights.
The maple glazed ham. Chef got the ham through work this year and it was, hands-down, the best ham we’ve ever had. Granted it could have fed a starving African nation, still could, but man it was/is good.
Carving! That’s me! In the dress I MADE WITH MY OWN TWO HANDS AND A SHITLOAD OF SWEARING. That’s my BIL on the left there. He just had his gallbladder out eight days ago and had been hanging for Christmas ham as the food stuff to return his diet to something more than the low fat low flavour existence he’d been living. The look on his face on tasting the first mouthful of ham was one of those quintessential Christmas moments.
I think if I ever start sending Christmas cards again I’ll just get prints of this photo. Does anything say Christmas more than this image?
The Christmas pud. This year’s was particularly outstanding. No idea why, did it at the 11th hour and forgot to put any peel in it whatsoever. Maybe that’s what it was. Anyway, I just ate a slice with cream for dinner. Noice.
Oh, the guinea pigs are still alive!
Merry Christmas to you all
I think after all these years you all know just how much you rock my world.
Scenes from Christmas
So Christmas Eve featured me having an appalling sleep because I was convinced Oscar would be up at 4am. We got to bed late (wrapping was delayed due to the finale of Project Runway and can I just say how STOKED I was that Leanne won and than Kenley was the first to go – I have zero tolerance for people who know they are rude and have a bad attitude but do nothing to change it) and then woke to Jasper coming into our bed at 3.15, followed by Grover waking with dirty pants and requesting a ‘bot-bot’ at 3.45 and then young male tenants next door not deciding to go to bed at all and starting on the bongos at around 4.30 and Oscar getting up at 5.
Oscar had asked Santa for an electric guitar and quite frankly, it was the first year there was a very definite request from Oscar that withstood the test of weeks. So Santa delivered. I don’t think I have ever seen Oscar more excited. He has requested a book to start learning how to play (but of his own initiative had found Felix’s piano book and was ‘using’ that) and told me he’s going to play it at school.
Felix’s request had been for a Lego Agents truck that does everything. While it took a while for him to wake up
he was pretty stoked. We didn’t see him for much of the day as he was building lego trucks and various other lego Star Wars ships he had received. In fact, his Christmas lunch consisted of some baked potatoes.
Grover got a big Tonka truck and while his day started with gross indignation at being woken
he too ultimately turned that frown upside down.
Jasper – while I had told him Santa had been and did he want to come and see what he’d brought him – was the last to get up but duuuuuudes, when Santa brings you the Thomas Bike you saw at the shops about s.i.x. weeks ago … that you had never ever forgotten about … then all your Christmases really do come at once.
Once the initial destruction had taken place and compulsory photos taken
there’s about 100 of these and in not o.n.e. are they all looking at the camera/smiling/have their eyes open
see! even dawn occurred during the attempt
… it was time to get drinking and doing not very much at all. Chef and I have some very lovely sparkling shiraz and well, Chef needed several cups of restorative coffee to deal with this year’s Construction Project. We’d got the boys a basketball hoop and quite frankly, putting it together was more complicated than, well, I don’t know what.
Naturally the plethora of helpers just made the whole process so.much.easier.
This year was remarkably low key. Just us, mum and my brother and his girlfriend, who only confirmed their attendance at around 12.30 when they phoned to say they were on their way. It was b.l.i.s.s.f.u.l. My childhood Christmas memories are marred by the delightful morning process being rudely interrupted by having to bundle gifts into the shopping basket, then into the car and then driving 2+ hours south for the family gathering. Hideous.
Such were my spirits I even wore a frock.
A bargain at $30 from Katies purchased Christmas Eve that had every single one of my children with coherent speech commenting on how lovely I looked and what was that I had on. I will probably never wear it again, dresses make me nervous, but there you have it.
The menu was very simple – The Ham
which was glazed with my Signature Glaze
potatoes roasted in goose fat, a la Nigella and greens (broccolini, sugar snaps, snow peas) tossed in butter and seasoned.
That was it. With a delicious 2002 St Hallet Blackwell Barossa Shiraz. We normally have a Christmas pudding boiled in muslin but we never got around to making it (the fruit is still macerating in the laundry) but none of us seemed to care.
The day was then
shooting hoops
mastering bike riding
shooting hoops, bike riding, obstacle avoiding
grazing
construction
and general all round happiness.
Festive rundown
I started a whole post about the lead-up to Christmas, the frantic last minute cooking, the not-such-a-hit Christmas Eve supper, the onslaught of the worst hay-fever on record which has developed (i.e. masked) into a fully-fledged cold with runny/sore nose, sore throat/cough, itchy mouth, scratchy eyes, itchy/achy ears, a chronic predisposition to crying which is even boring me and so on and so forth, but even I was bored by it, and we all know how much I love hearing myself whinge/moan/gnash teeth over the minutae of my boring as bat-shit life.
So I decided on a pictorial review.
But then Blogger decided to be SO slow.
So I got nothin.
Christmas was lovely, the time since a mix of absolutely delightful moments being with the boys to chunks of irritation, illness and domestic drudgery. So not really different to my normal life I suppose.
I will leave you, however, with the shrine to my husband’s masculinity. Built after a full day of work, a wee while entertaining (and drinking), in the dark and under a light drizzle of rain. This was taken Christmas morning, and the sheer gob-smacked wonderment of our children on seeing it, was worth every swear word uttered the night before.
