Christmas time... mistletoe and whine...

It may be a bit early for some, but I have flu (still) and have felt like crap for nearly a week now, so plans of being out and about this week-end evaporated and so we stayed in all week-end long.

That's not strictly true we actually went out to a dinner/dance on Friday night. It was a Christmas in July party at Suikerbossie, which never happened in July and somehow got moved out to 1 Dec (I didn't really understand the logic either). We are friends with the DJ and so we are lucky enough to be invited along to these things. We get to entertain his wife (my friend) while he is busy DJing and we also serve as rent-a-crowd-get-the-party-started-rabble-rousers. The point is the paying crowd can be a bit old, staid and boring so we help to liven things up a bit. ;)

Perhaps I should have taken it a bit easier in my condition, but it was fun at the time and the gammon dinner was good too. The rest of the week-end's plans however went right out the window and I did not leave the house again until this morning when I went to work. Blah.

On Saturday morning we made our 'Christmas Cookies'. They are the usual biscuits we always make but somehow it has become a tradition in our family - which we have done for the past 4 or so years now. We make our cookies, and decorate them with cherries etc, and then make holes in some of them so that we can thread a string through them and hang them on our tree as Christmas decorations. We also make a special one for Father Christmas, which is left out for him with a glass of milk on Christmas Eve.

Since I had already tossed out the idea of going to gym or doing anything else useful on Saturday morning we immersed ourselves in our cookie making. I made 3 different version of the cookie dough, yellow, pink and chocolate chip, and we had sprinkles, chocolate chips and cherries for decorations.

We got quite creative and were doing teddies clothed in yellow shorts and red t-shirts and all sorts of swirled and patterned designs. It was fun. But the rest of the week-end entailed eating a lot of these cookies too. :/

<- One of the cookies on the tree.
After the cookie making exercise, I realised that December has started and so we needed to get our advent calendar sorted out. We have a lovely reusable one which I have been filling on the sly each year. This year I let the boys participate. So we raided our sweetie tin and placed 2 items in each pocket. Then I decided that since it is December and we were already in the Christmas spirit we could just as well put our Christmas tree up. Richard decided that our usual fake tree would just not do this year. So he disappeared for a while and came back with a locally sourced alien pine - pilfered from somewhere in the neighbourhood. ;) We are not sure if it will last until Christmas but it is potted in damp compost, so hopefully it won't dry out too quickly. The tree went up and got decorated by us all. We have quite a collection of nursery-school-crafted decorations now, and Quinn was begging me not to put some of his 'ugly' decorations, which he made when he was about 3 years old. I told him I would treasure them and use them proudly *every* year just to embarrass him. Evil mom that I am. ;)

We also did our usual Christmas Elves photo session, which was quite fun, including some which will be suitably embarrassing at Quinn 21st ;)

Apart from that I watched lots of TV, finished my book, played Rummy with the kids, knitted with Quinn, cleaned the pool and weeded the garden. That was the week-end, all finished.

Let's hope this god awful flu goes away now so I can do some more exciting stuff this week.