Santa Claus is Coming!

This year (for the first time in AGES - more than I can actually recall...) Santa Claus is visiting our house! Nigel and I debated for a little while whether Santa was in fact going to come. (We thought perhaps he "might not know our address, since we've moved so much...") But in the end, we decided he may as well come. And it's so exciting.


I made some stockings especially to hang up for him to fill. (Seemed odd, when we don't WEAR stockings and we certainly have no fireplace to hang them over. I'm sure originally the tradition came from the family's washing hanging to dry in the middle of winter...) Nevertheless, Emily helped me a little bit with the sewing and she says "I think Santa will like these stockings!"



So we hung them up, and she wanted hers at the top. Fine, only then she was worried: "What if Santa can't reach my stocking?" So she decided to put a stool next to them, just in case. And she wrote a note. It reads "Dear Santa, if you can't reach my stocking, here's a stool." We left some cookies for him, too. I wonder what will be inside the stockings when we wake up tomorrow morning!

Otherwise, the day holds our very first "nuclear-family only" Christmas. We have not gone home for Christmas this year, and no one is here with us. But we've had a great time preparing for it. Here's our tree. (A darn sight grander than the little one-foot white jobbie that we've had for the last 5 years!). Every single decoration on the tree (apart from the electric lights) has been hand made.

If you look closely, you'll find paper chains of different colours, a few pop corn chains, one chain of painted elbow macaroni, a gingerbread man made by Emily at school, a gold-coloured pasta star made by Emily last year at school, a couple of 'furry stars' made by the girls after opening a present early that had lots of plastic 'fluff' and a funny cone-shaped thing at the top which I think was supposed to be a tree, but we decided it would look good at the top.

There are a few other one-offs, but mostly we really enjoyed making the tree decorations together. And decorating the tree several times (especially after Tessa managed to get at the tree in her walker!)

As a family, we also designed a menu together for the day, and have bought all the ingredients we need to make our 3 meals. There are some great favourites in there, like breakfast pancakes (Dad's domain), self-saucing chocolate pudding for the desert at lunch, and pupmkin soup with home-made German Zopf (bread) for dinner to go with our lunch leftovers. Emily and Zoe took great care putting our "menu" on the fridge, so we wouldn't forget.

Merry Christmas everyone.