Christmas Eve

This was the first time that Pete had been off on Christmas Eve for about 5 years so we decided to follow his family's tradition of having our Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve. It worked out really well with our wonderful Waitrose chicken breasts, gammon and duck with the orange sauce that I just sort of made up. I didn't do all the cooking - the idea was that I supervised or gave advice but of course, me being me took over at times!!

The table looked wonderful and we even got my Christmas wreath with a candle on the table. We used our penguin tablecloth and still had some penguin napkins left over from last year. As we were all going over to Pete's sister,s late afternoon, I was the nominated driver so sadly only had a sherry and wine!!! Laura got a lovely notebook collection, AJ got a wonderful blue top to match his blue eyes and Woody got a Saints mug. Pete and I got 2 big mugs - mine with a penguin on and with hot chocolate sachets inside and sweets so we were all happy. It was lovely to go out and be sociable and know that tomorrow, we can stay in for Christmas Day so drink what we like and the children can play all day.
As it was christmas holidays and I wanted mum to be able to stay with us so she could drink with us and not worry about driving back to my in-laws to sleep, we'd got the mattress down from the loft so all 3 children were in the boys room and Mum had Laura's bedroom to call her own. It worked quite well but is only practical during school holidays which is a shame.

Changing our Christmas meal to my Hubby's tradition, made me think about my childhood experiences of Christmas Eve. It was always full of expectation and it always felt it wouldn't be Christmas until Nunky Noo (my paternal uncle) turned up and Nanny (maternal grandmother)came over for our evening meal - in later years it was fisherman's pie for our evening meal.
Poor Nunky Noo!!! As soon as he turned up, my sister and I would play rough and tumble games with him, like tickling and him and he would grab our wrists and getting us to hit ourselves n the back of the hands and say 'why are you hitting yourself?'. We would also play rock, paper, scissors and another game which seemed to involve a bit of quick reflexes or esle we'd slap each other's back of the hands. We would wreak our revenge by messing up his hair - he was a bit of a fashion victim so in the 70s, he had quite long hair and flowery shirts. His length of hair meant that we could mess it and comb it in strange ways. In the evenings, we'd play board games or card games. My nany had a phenomenal memory for remembering what cards had been laid so she'd win whist but couldn't tell yo what she'd had fpr dinner though. It's odd how your memory does such strange things. Nunky Noo didn't believe in letting children win and would play dirty in chinese chequers or any game!!!
One year I had bought nunky noo some compost so didn't have wide enough wrapping paper to wrap it up in so spent the afternoon cutting out hexagons of different christmas wrapping paper and gluing it together to make a huge sheet of paper. It was such a huge piece of work and after that it became a tradition to wrap a present in this paper each year so alternate years, it went between him and us. It lasted years and became quite a tradition. It must have eventually broke but lasted a good 10 years - don't think the glue or paper we have now would last that long.
In the late evening we'd go off to the midnight service. Then come home and have some mince pies, gammon sandwiches or sausage rolls with our hot drink and then go to sleep. Fancy eating that much just before bed!!
This year neither mum or I had the energy to go to our local midnight service. It was too late for me now in my state of health.

AJ woke up just as we going to put the stockings out in the bedroom and wouldn't go back to sleep. Eventually, he went to sleep and so did we but without putting the stockings out!! Luckily, I woke up at 4am and took their stockings to their room. Hope theydon't wake us too early!!