It was a good one! The 24th is always a day of hectic preparation. First I clean the house. Usually my house-proud tendencies exhaust themselves in tidiness, when it comes to dust and slut-wool I favour the low-watt-lightbulb approach – if the lighting is bad you can’t see the dirt. But Christmas is different, so I hoover and dust and wipe and scrub until the house is half way decent.
Then I bring in the tree and take the ornaments down from the attic. I have a little tree in a pot. For most of the year he lives in the garden and does not answer to the name of Theodor Gruenbaum, and every Christmas he comes inside for three days to celebrate with me. I have lots of ornaments, every year I add to my collection. I like little wooden ones made in east Germany
Normally I have my bird Christmas after I finish the tree, but this year the birds looked awfully hungry so I decided to do their Christmas first. I hung up all sorts of feeders full of seeds and dried mealworms and maggots and insect pellets, hung up numerous fatballs, heaped seeds, especially black sunflower seeds, wherever I found a surface, and halved a dozen pears and apples and deposited them around the garden. A small plate of grated cheddar for the robins completed the Feast. Finally I sang a few carols while scrubbing and refilling the birdbaths, and retreated tactfully. Then I sat on my stove from where I can overlook the whole garden – all 300 square feet of it – and watched my guests arrive and help themselves. I even let the wood pigeons and magpies partake, seeing as it is Christmas – normally I chase them away, my garden is too small for such huge creatures.
Satisfied at last that everyone has been provided for, I check the fire in the Parlour. I laid it in mid-morning, it takes quite a while to get it going nicely and achieve a steady golden glow of the coals. But it looks like I am there, so now I can attend to dinner.
Christmas Eve I always have a simple dinner of potato salad and Viennese style sausages, easy to make and not too filling. I also start to make my Old English Tea punch, gleaned from an old German recipe book about baking cookies. As a last touch I put some orange and cinnamon oil into my atomiser. The whole house smells deliciously of orange, cinnamon, pine, and punch. I am now ready to change into a nice dress and begin Christmas proper.
Dinner is a and ‘Bescherung’ at eight. The latter means that I go into the Parlour and light all the candles. I go outside and close the door. I ring a bell as a sign that Christmas is about to start. Then I open the door and pretend I have not seen the room decorated before, and fairly swoon with pleasure at the sight before me!
I sit in an armchair and watch the tree and all the beautiful decorations, with all the glitter and shimmer, and feel truly blessed. My life is very wonderful. Then I take some photos – see below – and open all my presents. They are particularly lovely this year, especially the ones I bought myself. I start to buy presents in the January sales and then throughout the year, wrap them immediately in Christmas paper and put them on top of the wardrobe. By the time Christmas comes around I have usually forgotten what I had bought, so have a nice surprise when I open my presents.
There seem to be any number of people out there who think being alone at Christmas is an awful experience, best gotten over as soon as possible and with as little fuss as manageable. Quite a ridiculous attitude, in my opinion. If for whatever reason one has to spend Christmas on one’s own, one should make the best of it and enjoy all the benefits it brings. No arguments, no clash of different Christmas traditions, and one can eat all the best bits of the roast. And if I listen to the recording of King George V Christmas Address to the nation I can do that, too, without snide comments and/or aspersions cast upon my sanity.
Now I am off to digest my enormous roast duck followed by Christmas pudding dinner while reading The Willows at Christmas by William Horwood, a Christmas adventure of the characters of The Wind in the Willows, next to my fire in the Parlour, illuminated by all the candles in the room. Life is good. God bless us everyone!
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Before the Great Ornament Orgy |
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After the Great Ornament Orgy |
For photos taken without flash see next blogpost!
