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| Thank God for martinis. |
It’s not been terribly Christmassy in the
Auntie Bulgaria household this December. We both picked up a horrible bug that
knocked us sideways for the first 10 days of December. I mean, this bug had
everything: aches, shivers, sore throat, crackly wet cough, fever dreams,
sickness, headaches, you name it. I had several retinal migraines caused by low
blood pressure or low blood sugar or something. And I spent a feverish
night begging Rob to stop the world’s commodities being traded through my
jaw. My poor jaw was in agony from non-stop dreams of all the world’s
commodities passing through it every second. Never been delirious
before. It was pretty fun. Not for Rob, obviously, who had to try and placate
me while I was tripping my balls off on bad (stock market?) dreams – all the
while feeling pretty rough himself. What a guy.
So, anyway, when it snowed on 3rd
December – our first proper snowfall of the year – neither of us could muster
any enthusiasm to even take a picture. You’ll just have to imagine the scene
instead. It snowed for a day. Everything was white. It was very pretty,
probably. We were flinching in bed with the curtains closed.
One good thing about being ill is it gives you
lots of time for watching Christmas movies. As a result, we’ve already watched
loads of our Christmas favourites and it’s only 15th December. We’re
fast running out of movies to watch. We might have to – gulp – dust off Love
Actually.
As we’ve returned to normal health (and normal
dreams), the Christmas spirit has slowly been building. We managed a couple of
big supermarket trips, so we’re well stocked for Christmas and the winter – I
don’t know about you but a full pantry always gets me feeling cosy and wintery.
We managed to force down a few mince pies. And we put up the Christmas
decorations yesterday.
As for what we want for Christmas, we’ve been
apart a lot this year, each of us spending a lot more time in the UK for one
reason or another. So what we really want for Christmas is two weeks of
uninterrupted time off together, with both of us feeling healthy and happy and
ready to embrace another year. That, and some good books, and plenty of bubbly
and we’ll be living the dream.
What about you, what do you want for
Christmas? And what have you got planned for the big day? For Christmas dinner,
we’re eschewing turkey again in favour of a baked ham, and we’ll be having a very seventies fondue on Christmas Eve. There’ll be trifle for pudding, and our
trusty cheesy-and-Marmite ‘sausage’ rolls (no actual sausage included) to
nibble on. Boxing Day will be, as always, Pie Day, meaning we’ll bake a big pie
with leftover ham, red cabbage and potatoes. Looking at it on paper, that’s a
lot of cheese and pastry coming our way! But you have to feed a cold, right?
That’s our excuse and we’re sticking to it.
