Days 19 and 20

All I managed to do today was these two pages. I don't know why it takes me so long.

The Santa page took a while as I had to find photos of when Katie and Lizzie were little and visiting Santa in Milton Keynes. They were so cute and I wish they were little like that again.

'In the Post' should have been quick as it doesn't have very much on the page, but it wasn't!

Tomorrow I have to go back to work so it will take me ages to finish this album I think!

JYC pages 15, 16, 17 and 18

I managed to complete pages 15, 16 and 17 before Christmas and had page 18 ready for the photo of our Christmas dinner. I didn't get much access to the computer over the holiday period and had even less access to my scrapbooking things so this is my first real chance to update things.




Here are the next four completed pages for my journal. Tomorrow I plan to complete a few more! Watch this space.


Page 15 is 'Visitors' in which I talk about the family Christmases that we have had and the slightly smaller one we were going to have this year.


Page 16 is basically just a list of things that I am grateful for. Now Frank may face redundancy I think I should have put that I was grateful for us both being employed!


Page 17 is a short entry about presents and Page 18 is a discussion about Christmas food. I have included a photograph of the 2008 Christmas lunch which was indeed duck! And delicious it was too.

JYC Day 14

This is my page about opening presents. We always open them on Christmas Day but don't really have any traditions about the way this is done!

The journalling reads:

'I don't remember a tradition about handing out presents when I was young. The presents were given ou and opened as you got them, so sometimes that meant several people were opening them at the same time. It was something that never occurred to me at the time, but we didn't see what each other had received or from whom. We then showed the presents around after we had opened them.

When Katie and Lizzie were little, they took forever to open presents - sometimes the whole of Christmas Day. This meant that we got to watch them actually opening them and playing with them.

Now they are older we distribute presents to one or two people at a time and wait for those to be opened before passing out some more.'

JYC Days 10, 11, 12 and 13

I have got quite a long way behind but have finally managed to finish 4 pages and photograph them.

'Wrapping gifts' uses some of the paper that we use each year to wrap our presents in. We bought a huge pack of paper from Costco a few years ago and will be using it for the foreseeable future I think. It is nice paper though!

'Our Tree' was almost finished a few days ago, but I wanted to wait for a photograph of our decorated tree to add to the page. The tree is a real one but it is a bit unstable I think! Hopefully it will stay vertical until we take it down again in January!


In the Day 12 entry I compare various Christmases. My childhood Christmases, those of 25 years ago, when I first met Frank, 20 years ago when we had Katie and Lizzie and then again with how we spend Christmas today.

The final page here lists some of my favourite Christmas songs. Not carols, but more popular songs. I love hearing these on the radio as you get nearer and nearer to Christmas!

The girls are home

Early yesterday morning, Frank and I set off in opposite directions to get our daugthers. The weather was AWFUL! It rained all the way to Liverpool and the spray on the motorway made the visibility very difficult. However, I arrivedjust after 11 am, we got Lizzie's things packed up and left her flat at about 12.15. We stopped for lunch at Sandbach services and made it home at around 3.30 pm - not long after Frank got home with Katie. It is good to have them both home again!

Today I think it is time to buy the tree and get the house decorated. And then we have to write the Christmas cards and get them mailed!

Staff party

Friday night was the staff party at college. I left work at 11.30 as I had finished teaching for the day and came home to cook. I made the puff pastry first so that it could rest and then set about cooking the onions and preparing the rest of the stuff. I made puff pastry triangles, which were topped with red onions, stilton and pear and also filo pastry triangles that were stuffed with bacon, pate and chives. They all turned out pretty well considering it was the first time I had cooked them. I had intended to make twice as many but ran out of time, so the rest of the puff pastry is in the freezer waiting for me to make sausage rolls with it!

My Secret Santa was Malcolm - the head of maintenance. I had absolutely no idea who had been buying gifts for me but the gifts were all fantastic! A cookery book - all chocolate recipes; some bath salts; a countdown holiday clock; some chocolate biscuits and a Place in the Sun magazine and the final gift which he gave me on Friday was the book Chocolat, by Joanne Harris and a bar of chocolate.

We were supposed to be having a Beetle Drive after we had eaten but it was decided at the last minute that it wasn't a good idea as people don't want to sit with people they don't know very well! Personally I think that was the wrong choice as we all ended up sitting with those we work most closely with and what is the fun in that! You never get to know anyone else unless someone makes an effort and a beetle drive would have been the ideal way to do this! Hopefully the beetle drive will take place as a stand alone event next term! But I won't hold my breath.

JYC page 9

Traditions! This was a hard one for me as we don't really have many traditions at Christmas! Each year we do most things differently! No traditional Christmas dinner, no routine to where we go etc.

There are just a few things we do the same each year! We decorate the house with streamers and a Christmas tree, we open our presents on Christmas morning and we play board games throughout the holiday period.

Anyhow - here is my page!