Merry Christmas

Here it is, Christmas Eve, and so far we have survived the madness of December.......so what have we been up to?

We have just happened to move into a street that embraces Christmas lights, with one of the finalists of the competition in Bathurst being just a few doors up from us.  Last year, we had signed on the dotted line to buy this house, but not moved in.  We drove past to see the lights and noticed our house in darkness.  We couldn't have that, so this Christmas we strung up a few lights out the front.

We've enjoyed going for a stroll around our neighbourhood in the nice, warm evenings looking at the lights, and thought we needed to add just a little bit more.......which required another home improvement.......

You can sort of see the garden next to our front door when we bought the house....quite bushy.

Very early in the piece we removed a big grassy plant at the back and a few others and put in a standard rose.  The bush at the front remained as it was flowering at the time.  A few annuals were added, but nothing else was done then.

That looks better doesn't it,  It will look even better when the new plants thicken up.  By the way......meet Mervyn and Muriel the Mooses (or is that Moosii?).

There you go.  Our contribution to Christmas lights.  Some icicles, our tree all lit up and Mervyn and Muriel.  That will do nicely.

I did do one tiny bit of Christmas sewing.  My Mum tends to use place mats now, so I grabbed some old scraps of Christmas fabric, probably dating from the 80s, and whipped up a place mat in a couple of hours.  Very scrappy, just sew two bits together and add a bit more and so on.  Not much measuring.  The bottom left corner is even crazy patched to use up the funny shaped bits.  No binding, just turned out  and top stitched.  It is now being used, which is good.  There is plenty more Christmas fabric in the box, so I'll have to come up with some more projects, or make us some place mats for next year.

My SSCS gift has arrived at it's destination, with Marica in Sweden.  It is such fun sending to places you would normally never have any reason to post a letter or parcel to.  I can share the little ornament now, but will have to wait until she opens her main gift before sharing that one.  

My parcel from Steffi is waiting patiently under the tree for tomorrow's present opening session.  Always a parcel that everyone present looks forward to seeing opened.

Which brings us to Christmas day.  Ours will be fairly quiet, with quite a few people briefly dropping in at various stages of the morning.  There will only be five of us for lunch, so we will actually do a proper cooked Christmas dinner.  In the afternoon we will be off to visit some friends.

I hope you have all survived the Christmas lead up in one piece as well and enjoy a pleasant Christmas Day with those special to you.