Christmas Week

I hope you're all having a wonderful holiday season. It's so hard to believe that Christmas is done and dusted, and that I'm two hours away from the last day of the year. What a lot of preparation and shopping we did, and the big day passed by in a flash! I'm not good at taking photos when I'm uber busy, but here are the few that I (+ Marty & Amy) took.

This is just not something you see every day - my dining table with her covers off. I have a tremendous fear that this table has lasted for around 120 years, and it'll be my family that destroys her. However, Marty wanted to have a little of the timber on display at Christmas, so I needed to get busy with some polish. He stated that it's just not worthwhile having a lovely table if no one gets to see it. I guess he's right :-)

Marty cleverly took a picture of the table all set for Christmas lunch. I completely forgot with all the running around, cooking and last minute preparation. He takes much better pictures than I do anyway :-) One of these days I'll have enough of the Masons Vista dinner set that we can all have matching plates, but for now I'll mix and match with my white pieces. And a fun thing that I do each year is have a decoration on everyone's plate that they can take home at the end of the day.

Another thing you can see on the table is Camo's gingerbread house. I purchased two from Ikea recently so that he can work on his own while I make up mine. So much fun. We'll make the other one up later on in the holidays.

Here's a picture Amy took on Christmas day. Once all our family had arrived, the tree was absolutely bursting from below with presents. We had a great time opening them all, and the lounge was completely trashed afterward. I STILL haven't put the room entirely back together again. You just can't rush these things, right?

Next, it was time to make jam again. Our apricot tree has borne so much fruit this year, and I've no idea what I'll do with it all. Fortunately it had the good grace to ripen the day after Christmas, rather than the day before like last year. Christmas Eve is not the ideal time to rush into jam production. I have made so much jam, and I've stewed and frozen some too. I've been giving the fruit to neighbours and friends, we're so blessed to have such a productive tree with such sweet fruit. And in a month or so our peach tree will be ripening. I really love our summer fruits.

Today I have finally gotten a little of my sewing mojo back again. I lost it for a little while there. I've finished cutting out the next row of my Mrs Billings project, and I'm almost done marking the sewing dots on the reverse side. This one is a tricky one with lots of inset seams, so I have to be super careful. I'll share a picture of where I'm up to asap! Chatter soon!