Christmas in York
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
At 6 months, Jon was far too young to “get” Christmas in any form this year, but we certainly enjoyed it on his behalf. 
On the Saturday evening before Christmas, we cruised out of London on quiet motorways with Jon first awake quietly and watching the street lights, then later sleeping peacefully in his car seat in the back. We made excellent time, arriving at Simon and Nicola’s at 22h00. It was all good. 
I hadn’t looked forward to the idea of three nights of sharing our room with young Jon (he was NOT a silent sleeper when we did this in SA), but this time it was better than expected. He did call out a little in his sleep from time to time, but it was nothing that sheer tiredness didn’t get me past quite easily.
This year’s Christmas roast was a goose. (We always get something interesting out of Nicola. )
The 12lb (5.4kg) goose (which had to undergo some amputations before it would fit into the roasting tin) yielded copious quantities of goose fat which made absolutely DELICIOUS roast potatoes. In hindsight, the gravy could have done with less goose fat and less flour, but we didn’t let that stop us from enjoying the excellent repast.
The trip home was a somewhat less tranquil than the trip out… at least for the first 90-odd miles. After being an absolute angel for the afternoon at Tom’s family’s Boxing Day celebrations, Jon decided that his car seat in the back seat was unequivocally not somewhere that he wanted to be that evening.
We quickly discovered that when we stopped and poked our heads in the back to talk to him, he still had plenty of potential for being cheerful. That lasted all of 30 seconds once we’d left the parking lot. For the rest of the time, we made our journey in 15 – 20 mile hops (that’s how far apart the service stations were on the motorway) between pauses to re-establish that the screaming was, in fact, not that serious.
And no, we did try that, not interested in feeding either.
Eventually it occurred to me to dig out our cache of dummies from the depths of the changing bag and I held one in place (not the easiest of poses to maintain from the front seat but the back of the car was jam-packed) until it all went quiet. From then on, it was a very quiet and peaceful trip!
