Short days

It’s the winter solstice tomorrow, the shortest day of the year for the northern hemisphere.

Part of me is always a little bit sad as winter is my favourite time and reaching the shortest day means that we’ll be heading back out towards spring – but I’ve got to be honest and say that the gloom of this winter has bothered me more than usual.  Where are the crisp winter sunshine mornings, with air cold enough to make your breath steam out in front of you like a dragon? Where are the beautiful frost patterns that form over windows and in puddles?  Where’s the weather that makes you feel Christmassy? 🎄  Dark mornings, dark early nights … they’ve messed with the dog’s head this year too, and the last time I had this many broken nights was when my girls were very tiny!

It’s all just been one big mush of gloom, wild winds and enough rain to burst river banks and cause devastation across the country, and if the winter solstice means that we might be heading towards better weather, then I welcome it this year.

I’m a bit short of things to tell you this week – I’ve been wrapping Christmas presents, writing cards (just managed to catch the last posting date – phew), I’ve bought the turkey and that’s sitting in the fridge … it’s been a week of errands and catching up and none of it is very photogenic!

Not so small daughter came home from university last weekend.  My husband drove up to get her on the Saturday and they spent the day together before driving home on Sunday.  I was really glad they’d done that – my husband doesn’t often get time to spend just with not so small daughter and they had a wonderful time going to the pictures, doing a bit of shopping, eating out at the places that not so small daughter has been eyeing up this term and finally, checking out a few of her favourite bars.  She has thrown herself wholeheartedly into the student lifestyle – and my husband enjoyed being a student again himself for a few hours!

They hadn’t been home more than an hour when we got back into the car and went to get our Christmas tree.  We do buy a real one – I know some people have views on this – but we like to support a local farm shop which gets them in, and we love the smell of them in the house.  I always thank the tree for being with us over Christmas (which might sound quite nuts to you), but it’s a living thing and has an energy, and I have been learning this year about respecting the energies around us even if we can’t see them.  And I like saying “thank you” to the tree.  I’m speaking my gratitude out loud!

Big daughter arrived and the tree decorating commenced.  We’ve got a family playlist of music that always goes on, the dog gets over-excited, and our tree gets laden with our eclectic mix of ornaments with much hilarity and joy.  No chocolate decorations this year … the days of chocolate decorations being an essential part of the process seem to have passed us now and they get forgotten about by everybody except me, and it’s not really good for me to eat all the decorations.  I do have to be careful at this time of year because I LOVE chocolate, but eating too much makes me feel anxious and not always particularly pleasant to be around.  I’ve learnt to pace myself!

Why not have a tree with roots that we can decorate every year, I hear you ask?

I’ve got one!  It’s a bit small, though …

I think I might need to prune it as well, as it’s not quite classic Christmas tree shape!  I’ve had a chat with it, it says it can be a bit bigger for next year … 🙂

One more thing for this week – actually, this is something that I’ve done that I can show you … I’ve added some free Christmas and holiday sock wrap labels to the blog.  They’re in the blog shop and I’ve written a post about them here where you can download the labels directly from the post.  It’s handy for me to have them in the shop as you can load a few things into your cart and download them in one go, but because of all the faff around tax and selling outside of the UK regulations, I’ve got the shop set to UK sales only and you can’t always download from the shop if you don’t have a UK postcode so this is a way for me to make them available for everyone.

This is what they look like …

They’ve got care instructions on the back so that all your hard work is properly looked after, and they’re easy to download and print for yourself.  Recyclable, too!

I hope your Christmas and holiday preparations are going well.  It seems unbelievable that it’s Christmas next week but here it is, and soon we’ll be starting a whole new year.  2025.  It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, doesn’t it?

I’m wishing you a wonderful weekend! xx