Julie's Boggle

Christmas 2008 feels like something I need to sit down and think about.  It was most enjoyable, but also went so quickly once it started!

With Tom’s schedule being somewhat more flexible at the moment, we originally planned to avoid the traffic by leaving on the Monday of the Christmas week.  Then a nasty 24-hour bug ripped through the ranks in the 3 days or so prior to departure , and we counted ourselves lucky to have only lost one day.

Jon’s general enjoyment of the packing process (and all the glorious potential for UN-packing that it provided) didn’t exactly facilitate a speedy departure, but fortunately the trip itself went really well, bringing us into York round about tea-time on Tuesday.

The next day was Christmas Eve already.

Tom and I assisted with putting up the Christmas decorations and minding the babies (to the festive soundtrack of radio and TV carols), while Simon did last minute Christmas shopping and collected the Christmas chicken (a magnificent Yorkshire bird, tipping the scales at over 7lb!) from the thriving local butcher down the road.  (Apparently they open at 4am for people to collect their pre-booked meat, and there’s a queue!)

After another quiet evening engaged in the shared favourite pastime of playing board games, it was Christmas!  Jon and James let us sleep in a little and then it was off, through wonderfully quiet streets, to the Christmas family celebration at St Mikes in central York.  A service which neither of the two little ‘uns particularly enjoyed for reasons they couldn’t articulate.

In a gesture that gives away a lot about the respective ages of our party, we left the present-opening until after we got back from church.  And even then, it wasn’t until the Christmas chicken was safely stuffed and in the oven, and glasses of mulled wine had been distributed.

Christmas 2007 was mostly a non-event for 6-month-old Jonathan. This year though, it was fun seeing how he was ready for the next stage: learning how to open presents.  Better still, he even spent time enjoying the gifts themselves.

(By contrast, 7-month-old James was perfectly content with the marvellous rustling of discarded wrapping paper. )

The timing of our Christmas dinner had to be adjusted several times during the course of the day, but miraculously it all came together around 4pm. When not only was there a delicious meal on the table, but we also had both babies awake, well-rested AND ready for an early supper.  No mean feat!

As is our Christmas tradition, we all packed up on Boxing Day and headed off in the direction of our respective families (for us that was Tom’s cousin who lives in the Wirral, near Liverpool), armed with packed lunches of Christmas leftovers in sandwich-form.

And from there, after enjoying some family catching-up and a great Boxing Day tea, it was back out into the clear and frosty night and off to London.

Fortunately the screaming sessions of last year‘s trip home were not repeated, and even though Jon was awake for most of the trip, the occasional grumbling from the back was along the preferable lines of “quietly disgruntled”, rather than “very-VERY-annoyed”.

[For a pictorial version of our little trip, feel free to browse this album.]

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 10:07 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.