Christmas

Hellooo and welcome back! 

If you have popped over during the holidays you will have noticed that I took a wee break over the last couple of weeks but it's good to be back now!

So, how about a look at our Christmas?

Like I said in my last post, the week or two before Christmas were a bit crazy with special things on. There were parties, pantos and Carol Concerts. 

The primary school had their rather lovely Carol service in the famous Greyfriars Kirk.

Now, a spot of trivia for you, does anyone (not Scottish!) know why the kirk is famous? Actually there are two reasons, but here is a clue to one of them.

The high school concert took place in Edinburgh's Usher Hall, a quite grand setting for a fabulous concert. 

The day before the big concert, James (who was singing in it with both the Gaelic and the English choirs) tripped on his way up to school and landed face first on the pavement, almost breaking his nose and cutting all of his mouth on his braces! He had a lovely swollen, bruised nose and black eye for the concert!

My mum had come down for a week and she was able to come along and see all the boys in their various concerts. We just had to go for afternoon tea on one of the days she was down :0)

I do love all the run up to Christmas as much as the actual day itself. Although it can be quite exhausting.

 In a way, my favourite day of all is Christmas Eve. It's so full of anticipation!

On Christmas Eve we get most of our food prep done so that I don't need to spend all of Christmas Day in the kitchen.

Every year we have chocolate log as one of our Christmas Day desserts. (Recipe here.) Calum made a little robin out of sugarpaste to decorate it.

James once again took on the task of decorating the Christmas Cake. His little family of penguins seem to be the penguin version of ours. Even complete with a little rascal splatting one of his brothers with a snowball!

For a couple of days before Christmas little Alasdair hadn't been so well, with a temperature, cough and runny nose. He was excited to open up all the presents but he didn't really play with them properly until a couple of days later. Since he wasn't feeling great, he spent most of the day clinging to me so I don't have as many photos of the present opening as I would usually have.

This was my main present from my beloved. Doesn't he have great taste? The boys all claim to have had a hand in choosing it too.

One of my favourite parts of Christmas Day is, of course, the food!

I made a smoked salmon pate for starter, which we ate with various oatcakes and crackers.

It wouldn't have been Christmas without the turkey, now would it?

Accompanied by (gluten free) sausagemeat & apple stuffing balls, (gluten free) chipolata sausages...

.....potatoes roasted in goose fat (a la Nigella)...

...as well as various winter veggies, gravy, cranberry sauce and bread sauce.

We ate well, and we were thankful for much.

Post-Christmas Dinner we tend to play games like charades and have some silly fun.

This is our group photo, my parents in law, sister in law and all of us.

So there we have it. A rather lengthy post, but then I have been offline for over two weeks, and I still haven't started on how we celebrated Hogmanay!

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