The Colours of Christmas

Christmas colours in sunshine country! You no longer have to stick to the traditional red and green of mid-winter Christmases, but a new scheme of bright yellow, orange and red comes together all on its own. Sunflowers picked from the veggie garden, nasturtiums likewise, our everyday bright and cheerful plates seamlessly blending in.

Christmas Day was hot and sultry, so cold turkey, bacon wrapped sausages, gammon and salads were the order of the day. Followed by summer pudding, ice cream and a little tiny Christmas pudding just for tradition.

We still managed to be completely stuffed afterwards with barely any room for our traditional stripey jellies!

Now all the leftovers are finished, so I'm cooking a second gammon to eat cold for New Year's Day lunch - just to keep those Christmas flavours flowing.
And tonight we're celebrating with fillet on the braai. What about you?
Happy New Year everyone!

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Christmas Preparations

I haven’t been feeling very Christmassey so far. The press of work to be completed before Christmas, the usual self-employed person’s dread of the financial dead season casting a shadow over the delights of Christmas shopping, have rather left me lacking in the Christmas spirit.

But now our tree is is up – a beautiful one that my sister-in-law has had her eye on all year for it’s beautiful rounded and bushy shape. We cut it on Sunday, with a cluster of cousins visiting from the US to join in the fun.

It just fits into the house, talking up almost half the width of our sitting room, smelling of pine and twinkling with lights, two sets at least, the third one gave up after one day and we haven’t managed to find the guilty bulb!

Youngest helping bake the Christmas cakes

I’ve just made the marzipan for the Christmas cakes (baked a couple of weeks ago) – seemingly vast quantities of almonds, sugar and eggs, that underline how much of a festive celebratory excess Christmas cake really is.

I always use Delia’s recipe and just leave out the almond essence, adding extra lemon juice instead, and it makes a lovely mild marzipan, that all but the most ardent marzipan haters (my husband for one!) like.

Talking of marzipan I rather love the old English word for it – marchpane. It reminds me of a favourite children’s book by Alison Uttley, A Traveller in Time, where a little girl slips back to the 16th century in the time of Mary Queen of Scots. In between plots to rescue the sad queen from captivity, she fashions an elaborate model of the family farmhouse out of marchpane, an image that has stayed with me to this day. I could never work out how she made such intricate models and detailing from marzipan, which in my experience crumbles to pieces so easily... she must have had a different recipe!

Middle Daughter with papier mache goo hands

Middle Daughter has completed and wrapped an impressive stack of home-made presents, including papier mache masterpieces, our son has made his cards and has decided to make origami figures as presents this year, Youngest has written a story as one of her presents, that she was laboriously typing out on the computer, painful letter by painful letter. I stepped in and typed it for her, to her dictation, and just need to work out how to get it printed off to form a real book!

I on the other hand have purchased a total of two presents and am relying on last minute inspiration and the fact that the large family will anyway swamp our children with presents, so the tree will look suitably abundant on Christmas Eve!

How are your Christmas preparations going?

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Christmas Mumps

Christmas is like a hurricane, sweeping you up in a whirl and depositing you the other side among the debris, not quite knowing how you got there but drawing breath at last.

It smells like Christmas still, Christmas deconstructed, turkey stock simmering as the last vestiges of Christmas feasting are tidied out of the fridge. How can we have got through all that turkey already…and the gammon? Even the jelly is finished. The fridge looks way too tidy and empty.

There are presents still to buy or make but the momentum is gone. Our son’s last minute present making plans were thwarted when he went down with mumps on the Monday before Christmas. Lying on the sofa with a cool pad clutched to his chipmunk cheek he was in no fit state to be stirring lemon curd, or starting a production line of paintings like his sisters. He had just one present made and wrapped.

On the other side of Christmas he surfaced, with a new-found dislike of jelly, as it was the only thing he could eat for three days, and was finally able to make his lemon curd gifts. They are still languishing in the fridge, while he summons up the energy to wrap them and present them to his aunts – the gift-giving frenzy is over, along with the cast off wrapping paper, and the urgency is gone.

Now we are calculating the days until the girls can be expected to show signs of mumps too: +/– three weeks incubation = about when we are planning on going on holiday to the River with friends. So do we go and risk it, packing a large bottle of paracetemol syrup and a week’s supply of jelly, knowing that we’ll be a half hour drive from the nearest town down a bumpy dirt road?

Or maybe they could oblige and get it early next week, so they are starting to feel better by the time we go. Luckily we’ve already exposed said friends to mumps as our son had a sleepover with them just before he went down with it, so we don’t have to worry about sharing the germs!

The positive spin is that it is much better to get mumps before adolescence strikes, so really it’s in the nick of time for these eleven year olds, but our son didn’t find that very cheering while he was languishing on the sofa facing the bleak prospect of a Christmas Day spent unable to indulge in roast potatoes and a surfeit of pudding.

In the end he was able to eat the potatoes, his swollen glands having shrunk to a respectable hamster size, but after four days of not eating he could only manage four potatoes instead of his usual ten!

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Christmas is Coming, Ready Or Not

Silent Night is echoing around the house, as the girls learn all their favourite Christmas carols on the recorder.

Paint smears over T-shirts indicate that some serious pressie creation has been going on.

Middle Daughter now has two bagfuls of home-made presents all totally independently made.

Son spends time alternating between computer and book and is relying on a last minute batch of home-made lemon curd to solve all his present dilemmas.

Youngest is steadily amassing her pressies, but is way behind her sister, though keeping her nerve and persevering.

And me? I’ve done the bare minimum of shopping, just enough to provide a present each per child plus the odd stocking filler and am following my son’s example and relying on a last minute painting spree to create the rest of my pressies. Inspiration thrives on adrenalin, I hope.

The Christmas cakes are baked and awaiting their marzipan and icing.
The tree is still growing up at the top of the farm until we go to cut it on Sunday.
The girls have built a stable but we have no figures as yet for the nativity scene. I had the great idea of making our own wooden figures, which fell by the wayside several weeks ago.

And the reason my blog has been such a bare and windswept space…there has been plenty of writing material but a total lack of energy to shape it and put it into words, as the last two weeks have held:
A wind-pummelled two night camping trip with our son’s class, where duct tape was the main element keeping the tents up and poles shattered left right and centre.
Production of the school annual newsletter where each year we are sailing teeth-clenchingly closer to the deadline – this year it was printed at 9am before school’s close at 11am…
Family over here from Australia and consequent feasting.
Son’s class play, where he excelled as cut-throat robber at the first performance and Zeus at the second.
My mother arriving from England for Christmas.
Our belly dancing end of year performance at our house, for which clear floor space was required, a scarce commodity even in our spacious abode.
Much juggling of work with all the above, which made me realize how much more time efficient I could be every week if pushed.

So I am thankful that the girls are keeping themselves so busy with Christmas preparations, churning out cards for me to send to family overseas, keeping the spirit of Christmas alive in our house, so that I can coast along in their slipstream and let the momentum gather in their wake.

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Happy Christmas

Wishing you all a wonderful and joyful Christmas time!

This picture sums up a summer Christmas for me. A miniscule smidgen of cake consumed alongside copious slices of watermelon for a late tea, followed by a gentle stroll around the farm just after the sun had gone down. It was cool enough to have a hot Christmas lunch with roast potatoes, bread sauce and the whole caboodle, so we indulged mightily until we could scarcely move. I'm happy to say that we managed to make more inroads into the cake this morning, with the help of visiting family, and are dealing well with the leftovers.

The fridge should be nice and empty by the time we go off on holiday on Sunday. A week away at a house in Knysna, near beaches, lagoons and boats and more family... then two days on safari, for our first time ever, all courtesy of my mother who is staying with us now. We have to pack lightly with six of us in the car, but I'm going to find room for some of the art materials that I got for Christmas and have a play with paints and pastels.

The children got Twister for Christmas and so are now in a tangled heap on the ground, amid constructions of 'Planx' (another present that Dad has also been enjoying), and wearing sparkly princess jewels and dresses (not Dad though).

The star on top of the Christmas tree is bowing lower as the tree wilts slightly in the dry air. We'll leave it up when we go and come back to a needleless tree skeleton probably, but it would be too sad to take it down so soon. We get back on the 6th, so it will be the first thing we do when we come home, putting away the decorations and sweeping every last needle out of the house on the last day of Christmas.

In case I don't get back to my blog before then I'll say Happy New Year now too. May it be peaceful, prosperous and full of happy surprises!

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Christmas Trees

At last I am starting to feel a bit Christmas-y. It's the scent of pine that does it. First of all we cut some branches of a wonderful, almost lemoney smelling, pine for the children's nativity scene, which has taken over the fireplace. It's way too hot to gather around a log fire here, so the fire place has been turned into a stage for Mary and Joseph, who are tortuously making their way day by day, painfully slowly, to the stable at the front. An angel is sitting on the roof with the baby Jesus. The plan was to suspend her from a wire on the chimney, which needed Dad's expertise to attach, and then lower her a tiny bit every day until she alighted on the roof on Christmas Eve. But she is quite happy lolling on the roof with the babe in her arms and Dad has been busy on other things, so there she has stayed throughout Advent.


We chose our tree carefully from the ones flourishing at the back of the farm. There were loads of big ones and loads of tiny self-seeded baby pines, but it took us ages to find a good shaped tree the right size this year. In the end we decided on a siamese twin tree. Two trees had grown so close together that they made one tree, so we cut them together and they are now looking festive, if slightly drunken from some angles.

The two dolls houses both got a tree this year. There were so many seedlings that we just pulled a couple up for the doll's house family to celebrate with.



We had our Summer festival yesterday, which was lovely, so now there is nothing else between now and Christmas. I anticipate a flurry of making marzipan and icing the cake, wrapping presents, painting the rest of my presents and finishing off last bits of work.

The other Christmassey scent of smoked gammon, which has been tantalising me every time I open the fridge, will pervade the whole house on Christmas Eve, when I am going to cook the hams, mingling with clove notes and cidery fumes, and we'll have them cold with salads and cold turkey on the day itself. Cinnamon will find its way into the couscous salad, aslo filled with mang and toasted almonds, so those traditional spices redolent of Christmas will still get a look in despite the hot weather.

Hope you are all having a wonderful lead up to Christmas!

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Christmas Heat

Feeling Hot hot hot!
It’s 38 degrees C out there and was hotter yesterday – summer has come blasting in, making it hard to think of Christmas. Baking and spicy scents of cinnamon pervading the house just don’t really work when you are melting in the shade. Candles, firelight and warming spiced food are so much part of the Christmas atmosphere to me that it is hard to get in the mood sometimes.

Christmas carols waft through the house, shimmering like snowflakes: ‘earth stood hard as iron, frosty wind made moan’. They demand huge leaps of the imagination, as we swelter in T-shirts trying to think of a Christmas present to make that does not involve sewing felt – just thinking about felt makes me hot.

Christmas as a hot weather festival hasn’t really made it into my sub-conscious – here people take off for the beach and have big barbeques for Christmas, but it just don’t feel right to me! I need turkey and ham, Christmas cake and mince pies, candles and frosty carols... here’s wishing for cooler weather, so I can restore the illusion of Christmas festivities for my inner child!

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Tinsel Alert

I received my first Christmas card today.

I know it’s still September – who is thinking about Christmas, apart from over-zealous sales teams and really super organized people (that is for my mother who I know is already preparing to come out and visit us this Christmas and so has started shopping already!)

My eight year-old daughter – that’s who. She has started producing a nice line of Christmas cards, with added decorations and notes.

I promised to find them envelopes (Youngest was creating her birthday invitations at the same time) but promptly forgot about it. This proved to be a perfect example of the benefits of idle parenting, because they then made their own beautifully decorated envelopes. Our paper supply is rapidly dwindling …

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Wishes for 2008

It's time for New Year's resolutions again. I can't remember if I made any last year, but I do remember that we always used to make ones that were doomed to failure within a week and thus were discarded as a bad job for the rest of the year.

So this year I had another idea of what we could do to mark the change of years without over-facing ourselves. We're making paper streamers. On one side we write a thank you for all the good things that last year brought and on the other a wish for all the things we hope for in 2008. Then we'll pin them to a stick in our circle and leave them to flutter there, fading in the sunshine, dissolving into the rain.

This way they aren't resolutions that we feel bad about if we fail, they are wishes and we can keep on trying at them until we get close, or they can evolve through the year - there'll be no stark lines of writing to remind us of our shortcomings, as they'll have long ago weathered away, but our hearts will bear an imprint that is kind enough in its interpretation to allow us a whole lot of leeway and multiple tries.

At least that is the idea!

The children have already done theirs - their thank yous are simply for the happiness of last year and wishes for more happiness in the year to come, Middle Daughter's phrased as 'I wish for more happiness to come to earth', which touched me in a melting, gooey mother kind of way! Mine is filled with reams of detailed personal thanks and wishes - far less universal and altruistic than hers …

For all my blog friends I wish you a 2008 filled with love, joy and abundance, with plenty of new opportunities for creativity, work and play!

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Puddings in a Hot Climate

Our Christmas Day feast has to end in far too big a choice of puddings! Summer pudding has become our traditional pudding for Christmas, made with our own berries, frozen specially so we have some left for the big day. And stripey jellies have become an essential component of the pudding spectrum - I have to start at least a day before to have time to build up all the layers and take great pains to get random colour combinations, so that each one is different! A real Christmas pudding always appears, but is usually barely nibbled at on the day, leaving me with a big bowl of brandy butter to find a use for. Has anyone got a clever way of using up brandy butter, once the Christmas pudding is finished? I'd love some ideas ..besides just eating it with a spoon on surreptitious visits to the fridge!

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The end of an era

Father Christmas has officially been rumbled in our family.

I've been anxiously expecting it for the last three years, unsure how I was going to handle it, worried that our son would feel a sense of betrayal, that we'd tricked him. He was six the first time he heard rumours of parents putting presents in stockings and asked me about it. The younger girls were around at the time, so I placated him with a half truth and ever since then he has happily made cards for Father Christmas and left carrots for the reindeer.

He is nine and a half now though and I was beginning to fear the other extreme - him getting mocked at high school for still believing in Father Christmas!

I made the tactical error of buying some glittery mosaic pens, that they'd been admiring in the crystal shop a couple of weeks ago, to put in their stockings. This, combined with our son's friend and his family coming to lunch on Christmas Day, he who was bursting with the knowledge of the Father Christmas conspiracy, meant that before the day was out, just as we were waving off our friends, our three children went into a secretive huddle.

Middle daughter emerged and made a bee-line for me:

"Did you buy the pens and crystals in the crystal shop?"

I deflected her with a "What do you think?" and a quizzical look, not quite ready to start explanations in the middle of all the goodbyes.

A hurried confab with my husband ensued and we decided to wait for any more questions, rather than make them face bald truths that they weren't sure they wanted to know.

I felt a bit sad that Youngest had also been disillusioned when she is still only five, but I guess that is the way it goes in families where the children share everything, knowledge included.

Nobody asked questions at bed -time to my relief, but I couldn't quite relax, trying to work out an explanation that would make sense to them.

In the end the questions came the next morning, when I came through bleary eyed at 6.30 to find them all sitting on the sofa, not watching a video as usual, but individually playing with their favourite Christmas presents or reading.

Middle Daughter was the one determined to get a satisfactory answer. She repeated her question of the previous day.

I looked at them and asked if they wanted me to tell them more. A solemn "Yes" came from them all.

I launched into my prepared speech: about how St Nicholas was a real man who lived a long time ago, who started the tradition of secretly leaving presents for the children of his town around Christmas time. That after he died the parents decided to carry on his tradition. That the story of Father Christmas comes from him and is all about the spirit of Christmas, of loving and giving. That younger children have the whole Father Christmas story but when they are old enough to ask questions they are also old enough to understand what Christmas is all about. That Father Christmas may not be a real person but his spirit is out there - just like with angels, you can't see him. That even though parents have to do the actual buying of presents, the spirit of Father Christmas is still a part of it.

What amazed me was how comfortable they felt with the angel comparison - they could relate to that and it helped them understand.

Youngest has said a couple of times that she hopes she forgets so that she can enjoy it all next Christmas and our son would also rather forget and keep the illusion going. It is our seven year old Middle Daughter who, in the scientific spirit of investigation, keeps coming back to me with questions about whether I bought everything and was it Father Christmas who took their thank you cards.

All in all it was easier than I feared and I hope they manage to let it all settle into the nether reaches of their subconscious and enjoy their stockings next year too.

I'm wondering how long it'll be now till the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny get their cover blown!

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Christmas Spirit

I've achieved a measure of Christmas spirit at last! I've finished the last bit of work, told my clients I'm having a break till New Year and I actually baked the Christmas cake yesterday despite the sweltering heat!

We always go and cut our tree on the Saturday before Christmas, so that everybody can be there. The week before, we stroll up to the top of our property, where there are innumerable self-seeded pine trees - alien invaders that it is our positive duty to clear - and we choose the prettiest small one to be our tree.

Yesterday we waited till the end of the day, when the heat was beginning to fade and inspected our short-list of trees. The thing about looking at a tree outside under the sky is that it always looks too small. Our house has high ceilings, but even so one year, the monster tree we'd lugged down the hill had to have a couple of feet trimmed from the base before we could stand it upright. This year we had to vote three trees and the adults managed to sway the kids towards the smaller one, that was a nice shape and a whole lot easier to carry. They were a bit concerned that it would be too small and not have enough room for all the decorations, but lo and behold, when we got it into the house, relieved to be carrying a lightweight rather than a back-breaking monster log, it was the perfect size!

Then comes the traditional sense-of-humour-failing struggle with the Christmas tree lights. It is always supposed to be the Dad who has steam pouring forth from his ears, as one bulb blows the whole string, but in our family it is me. I climb the ladder, keeping the kids in check in their eagerness to pile on tinsel and decorations, get the lights perfectly balanced, yell for extension cables and adapters to test them out. This time they worked fine, looked great and I let the children loose on the tree, while I cooked a belated supper. After supper I couldn't resist fiddling - I put the star on top of the tree and noticed that the bulb behind the star, which ought to highlight it, wasn't working. No problem, I thought, I'll simply change it with another one lower down that doesn't show so much. I promptly managed to tear the bulb wires loose from their socket and the whole string was rendered useless. AAARGH! I couldn't leave things alone till morning. I had to get it right that night, a half dressed tree is too a depressing a sight, so I spent an hour fiddling with bulbs, looking at all the spare strings of lights to find the same type of bulb as a replacement. Nope. This was the only string with that particular shape of bulb. There was no alternative. The children now long gone to bed, I tore off all their carefully arranged tinsel, took down the lights and started again. There was a certain grim enjoyment of all this, at last I got the tree to myself and once the lights were sorted I spent the rest of the evening, half watching Shall We Dance, but mostly re-arranging tinsel and baubles to my satisfaction.

I'm now sitting at the computer once more, this time printing off endless blank calendar pages, for the child sweat shop/elf calendar production team, who have decided that this year's presents are going to be drawn rather than sewn. Present making is a last minute business this year - whereas we usually start making things for Christmas in November and I have plenty of time to help sew, untangle knots and thread needles, this year I've been leaving the children to their own devices, while I try to be a WAHM.

Middle daughter has set to drawing with speed and a light touch and has made two and a half calendars of twelve drawings each, is working on a picture book with plans to make her brother and sister something too.


Youngest battles, with her abilities not quite meeting her high expectations of herself, but is persevering and has nearly finished one calendar. Our son is painstaking with his pictures but tires after one or two and dives back into his latest book He has decreed that this one calendar is for posting off to his name-parent (godmother), so has nothing to give the family here. I've dragooned him into agreeing to make lemon curd for the rest of his presents, as I can't see him producing anything more than a card before Christmas and we have two aunts, a grandmother and an uncle besides our little family to provide for.

I also need to make marzipan for the cake, start on making stripey jellies, wrap presents besides feeding us today and keeping the house clean ..so what on earth am I doing blogging now, when everyone else is too busy doing their own Christmas preparation to read it!

Happy Christmas to all my blog friends - have a lovely family time and may 2008 bring you all good things, peace and happiness!

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Bowled Over

Our son's career aspirations have shifted, for the first time in several years. As his dad was tucking him up tonight he confided that he is going to be a cricketer until he's 40 and after that a film-maker… the game ranger scenario seems to have been ousted for the moment.

He is surrounded by a glow of exhilaration, brought on by the final morning's match of his four day cricket clinic, where he distinguished himself among the group of nine-year olds by bowling two boys out, almost catching out two more (but the ball escaped his grasp at the last moment) and hitting two balls for four, thus winning the match for his team!

This was only the second time he has been to a holiday cricket camp and he doesn't play at school, (though he had some great coaching when Grandpa was visiting recently and practises bowling and batting at home with Dad), so he is doing really well. Visions of playing for South Africa are floating rosily in his eyes.

The girls were less enamoured of the cricket groupie scene. Sitting beside a grassy field, being blasted by the wind for three hours had them grumbling madly, even though I'd had the forethought to bring a book to read to them. They put up with it as patiently as is possible for five and seven year olds, and made it through the rather lengthy prize-giving and certificate presentation afterwards. We redeemed ourselves by going out for a pizza afterwards, hitting the heady heights of Kloof St and a smart pizzeria instead of our usual chain pizza place. I was away from my computer for the whole day and it felt like a complete holiday. Relaxed into wind and sun blasted languor we only got home in time for a late supper.

Tomorrow is a full day of work, some shopping and baking in preparation for our summer festival on Saturday, when we're going to have a house full again, so I might not be back on the blog till next week. Next week I'll have to make that Christmas cake, I've left it till the last minute yet again. Will I ever be organised enough to bake it in November, or even October? Maybe one day!

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Advent

The 1st of December means two things to my children: advent calendars and the Christmas carol CD. Every year Granny seeks out beautiful advent calendars (the ones with pictures inside the doors, glittery nativity scenes and snowy villages) and either brings them or sends them in time for December.

For the last week the children have been sporadically wondering whether Granny remembered to send them in time, until yesterday I relented and revealed that they were already stashed in the spare room from her last visit. Of course then there was no peace until I got them out and much poring over them was done. Youngest has a clever one with a different sticker for each day, which gradually puts all the animals into the nativity scene, but was eying the others' glittery ones too, trying to weigh up glitter versus stickers and work out if she'd been short-changed! (She does like it Granny, don't worry!)

Ryan (our farm employees's son, who goes to school with the children and spends his afternoons here) was looking puzzled at the advent calendars, so my son explained the whole idea to him. I'd mentioned making them for people when I was at school and he was seized by the idea of making a calendar for Ryan, so that he'd have one too. All yesterday afternoon he drew the main picture, marked out the windows, drew little pictures for inside the windows, carefully cut the sides of the window flaps with a Stanley knife, then today he glued it together and presented it to Ryan, with careful instructions of when to open each door.

The Christmas carol CD will no doubt be tunefully playing in the background several times a day from tomorrow, to get us in the right mood for making presents, cakes and mince pies now the weather has finally turned summery.

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Bethlehem Blues

My children’s current favourite for singing in the car is, season notwithstanding, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. They see no good reason for restricting such a good tune to one small section of the year. I may be able to ban the playing of the Christmas Carol CD outside December and January, but I can hardly censor their car singalong material. So it is that in our warm autumn April sunshine, I am driving along with youngest to pick up the others from school, belting out ”.. joyful all ye nations rise..” at the top of our voices, slightly out of tune with each other.

Youngest thinks about her next request carefully.
“The one with Bethlehem in” she says.
I need more of a clue here. Quite a few Christmas carols fit the description.
“ With Jesus in”
Not much clearer.
“and Mary and Joseph.”

This is as far as she can take me to identify what she’s after. Tentatively I strike up “Oh little town of Bethlehem” but know I’ve got it wrong when a resounding silence wafts from the back of the car. “O come all ye faithful” gets a little hum of recognition but no wholehearted acclaim.

It isn’t until the return journey that the puzzle is resolved. Big sister is humming something under her breath.
“That’s the one Mummy!”
I ask her to sing a little louder so I can hear over the shake, rattle and roll of our car’s personal anthem. It turns out to be “Away in the Manger”.
I sing it all the way through without turning up a single reference to Bethlehem, even in the third verse.

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Down with Decorations

6th of January – Epiphany – the day the Three Kings finally made it to Bethlehem and the day all the Christmas decorations MUST come down. Every pine needle, every scrap of tinsel, every holly berry must be expurgated from the house before the day is out or else dire, but unspecified, consequences could befall you...at least so the ancient superstition goes.

I think it was invented by some Scrooge Bah Humbug type, who would have really rather chucked the tree out on Boxing Day. Unfortunately for him (and it was definitely a him) the church and its Twelve days of Christmas upheld the rest of the family clamouring to keep on celebrating and singing Christmas Carols for a further eleven blooming days.... but the twelfth day was his.

OUT with the Christmas cards that make it so hard to dust the mantle piece (and give the wife every excuse not to bother for a whole month), out with the annoyingly huge tree obscuring the living room, out with the oh so jolly festoons, swags, stars and greenery decking picture frames, window sills and every darn surface in the house..out with it all OR ELSE. Plus you better dust and sweep every inch of the house cos those pine needles get everywhere and one speck of glitter undetected in a corner could jinx the whole of the rest of the year.

This superstition still manages to linger in my head, however much I know it is rubbish. I still feel the tree must be outside, the floor swept of needles, the decorations packed away before the clock strikes twelve. A fit of New Year spring cleaning threatens to engulf me in its tentacles and I am tempted to consign all the unmatched plastic miscellany that strews the floor straight to the bin, vital part of some Christmas present or no.

The sitting room looks dull divested of its Christmas baubles. No green photosynthesising presence bringing the outdoors in. I think I need to get a huge wild vase of flowers to riot and shed leaves and blooms in the fireplace..I miss that tree.

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Christmas Passed

Christmas started early in our house as anticipation and speculation sparked off chirrupings in the children’s bedroom at 5.30. By 6 o’clock we caved in and let them onto our bed to demolish their stockings. The compensation for this was that we had a gentle stroll outside in the early morning sunshine, cup of tea in hand, watching the swallows swooping to catch their breakfast, while the children were watching a DVD and examining their booty.

One of the advantages of a summer Christmas is that we eat the traditional fare cold, with salads, so we were able to do a lot of the preparation beforehand and spend time on the phone to far-flung family without burning the sprouts. Our gammon was already sitting cooked in its cidery stock, ready to be glazed with mustard and treacle sugar. Some of the stock transformed the couscous from plain starch into a flavourful salad that sings in its own right with mango, nuts and herbs. My sister-in-law took charge of the turkey and stuffing, as well as the sausages wrapped in bacon and other sister-in-law is the salad queen, so the food front was divided and conquered. The puddings were ready in the fridge – a succulent summer pudding made with the berries from our farm and these stripey jellies that I love because they are so pretty and jelly is an intrinsic part of the Christmas feast for me, plus some meringues and the de rigueur Christmas pudding (a small bought one for the traditionalists).

The Christmas feasting is now over for another year. Our fridge was groaning with the leftovers, enough turkey and ham, summer pudding and stripey jelly to re-enact Christmas lunch for four days in a row and we still were enjoying it – that ham was soooo good!. The Christmas cake stands proudly aloft bearing its plastic donkey and sparkly angels that were selected to adorn it this year. Despite the enormous lunch on Christmas Day we did manage to sample a sliver of it for a late afternoon tea time. Gastronomic heroism on the grand scale.

The earthquake rumble of new skateboards on wooden floors, the shrieks and giggles as they crash, bright streaks of paint from craft sets on new Christmas outfits, soaking in Biotex in the bathroom, folded wrapping paper rustling, as it is restrewn across the sitting room floor the girls re-playing their best part of Christmas by wrapping then unwrapping their presents once more, the crunch of plastic cracker novelties underfoot, these are the soundtrack of the aftermath of the festivities....those skateboards may well meet an untimely end fairly soon!

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Happy Christmas

Apologies for the long absence...I might even get back to posting after Christmas - right now the words section of my brain has been highjacked by the food and present making part - not enough megs to complete all applications without crashing!

Have a wonderful Christmas all my blogging friends - I've really enjoyed meeting you this year and discovering such a wonderful community full of warmth, wit and wisdom.


Here is a virtual mince pie for you -succulent spiced fruit and crumbly pastry.
Lots of love to you all

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Icing the Christmas Cake

I've hardly been near my computer in days. We are living in a flurry of felt, tissue paper, coloured card, bright scraps of wool, overlayed with a fruity aura of jam-making that has the kitchen at the centre of our life, now it is the holidays. An undercurrent of barely suppressed excitement about the upcoming day of presents occasionally bursts forth into sibling squabbles, giggles and play fights.

The children are a hive of industry making cards and presents to send around the world to friends and family. We rushed the fruits of their labours to the post office today in the optimistic hope of them reaching England in time.

This year though their projects are far more ambitious than last year. Gone are the days of being content with sewing a few sequins onto a circle of felt to hang on the tree. My six year old made herself a cushion at kindergarten from hessian, embroidered with her own design of Christmas tree, stars, flowers and angels. So pleased is she with her new skills, that each Christmas present is a long labour of love.

Youngest needs considerable input from me in her creations but is equally ambitious, the problem being that she loves the end result too much to part with it..so far she has made herself one present and two cards....! My son started off with a prodigious output of intricate little felt decorations but now has decided to tackle a felt angel and occasionally disintegrates into frustration, when the thread knots yet again and the head looks too wobbly.

Meanwhile I try not to burn the jam, huge amounts of plums and apricots having arrived to make up for the meagre strawberry crop. My shelves are finally filling, I'm running out of jars, so we should be in good shape jam-wise for the year. Phew!

Now the Christmas Cake needs its layer of almond paste/marzipan . It is supposed to go on about a week before the royal icing, to give it time to dry a little. Two or three days before has always been fine for me, as we are usually eating it fairly soon after.

Here is my favourite recipe, in case any of you are bravely tackling the Christmas Cake recipe and have been left high and dry by my failure to post the next step.

Marzipan Recipe

(for an 8inch round cake)
335g/12oz ground almonds
165g/6oz icing sugar (powdered sugar) sifted
165g/6oz caster sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1-2 tablespoons brandy or sherry
4 egg yolks
apricot jam

Mix together all the dry ingredients, then stir in the lemon juice, brandy and egg yolks. Knead it into a stiff dough, but don't overdo it with hot hands or it can become slightly oily. Brush the cake top and sides with the apricot jam (warm it a bit if it is too thick). Dust a surface or pastry board with icing sugar and roll out half the almond paste/marzipan till it is just a bit bigger than the top of the cake. Put the cake upside down onto the paste and trim to fit. Roll out the rest of the paste to go on to the sides of the cake. It works best if you aim for an oblong twice the height of the cake and half the circumference and cut it in half to get two strips the height of the cake. Press them firmly onto the sides of the cake and press the joins together. Turn the cake the right way up and trim any ragged bits. Wrap it back up in greaseproof paper and foil for another week before putting on the royal icing. Don't worry if it doesn't look perfect and you can see all the joins, the last layer of royal icing covers it all up anyway.

Royal icing

525g / 1 1/4 lb icing sugar
3-4 egg whites
1 tsp lemon juice

Put the egg whites into a large mixing bowl. Stir in the sugar a few spoons at a time. Add the lemon juice. When it is all mixed in, beat with an electric beater until the icing is thick enough to stand up in peaks. I like a rough finish to my Christmas Cake so just slap on the icing with a palette knife in one layer and rough it up a bit more to look like choppy seas, but you can also do a glassy smooth finish. This icing can set rock hard in hot weather, so if you want to make sure of not losing any teeth, you can add 2 teaspoons of glycerine to the icing. In England the icing used to stay soft for ages, in the nice cool damp climate, but my first Christmas here in South Africa the cake needed a pick-axe to access it!

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Christmas Cake Recipe

Our Christmas cake is baked at last. The dried fruit had been soaking in brandy for a whole week in the fridge, but seemed none the worse for it luckily. Not huge amounts of brandy I hasten to add – three tablespoons and the alcohol content long ago evaporated away. So yesterday the kitchen exuded a gentle spicy aroma as the cake cooked extremely slowly for four and a half hours. Just one whiff is enough to conjure up Christmas.

It is just the sort of rich, damp, heavy fruit cake that Captain Hook put out to poison the Lost Boys in the original Peter Pan story. That detail seems to have been omitted in the updated versions, maybe these days it seems too old-fashioned to believe that rich cake is death to young stomachs! My kids aren’t really into the cake itself anyway, but they love the marzipan and icing, so will nibble meagrely at the cake in order to justify feasting on their icing and that of the adults as well, who Jack Sprat-like tend to prefer the cake and leave the excess sweet icing to the children.

At Christmas time I usually get out the reliable old Delia Smith cook book to check out the cake recipe and quantities for the marzipan. Her recipes almost always work and are accurate if not always inspired. I almost remember when she was the hot young TV chef and her ‘One is Fun’ was the latest innovative bestseller in the food book arena. Now she is long supplanted by the younger, sexier Nigella, but her books are still at the back of my shelf for when I need to check details of some ordinary but useful dish.

Rich Fruit Cake recipe

450g/1lb currants
175g/6oz sultanas
175g/6oz raisins
50g/2oz glace cherries(optional)
50g/2oz mixed candied peel chopped
3 tablespoons brandy
225g/8oz plain flour
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg
½ teaspoon mixed spice
225g/8oz unsalted butter
225g/8oz soft brown sugar
4 large eggs
50g/2oz chopped almonds
1 dessertspoon treacle
grated rind of 1 lemon
grated rind of 1 orange

The night before you want to make the cake, soak all the dried fruit and peel with the brandy. Leave it in a covered bowl over night or at least twelve hours.

Grease and line a 20cm/8 inch round cake tin or a 18cm/ 7 inch square one.

Sift together the flour, salt and spices. Cream the butter and sugar together in a large mixing bowl until light and fluffy (make sure you do this thoroughly). Beat eggs and add them a little at a time to the creamed mixture, beating well each time. Next fold in the flour and spices gently. Stir in the dried fruit and peel, treacle and the grated lemon and orange rind. Spoon the mixture into the prepared cake tin and spread it out evenly.

Tie a band of brown paper round the outside of the tin and cover the top of the cake with a double layer of greasproof paper (with a hole cut in the middle of it) Bake the cake at 140C/275F on the lower shelf of the oven for 4 ¼ - 4 ¾ hours. Don’t open the door to check until at least 4 hours have passed. Once the cake has cooled wrap it in a layer of greaseproof paper then foil.

Delia recommends feeding it with brandy every week or so, by poking a couple of holes with a skewer then letting a few teaspoons of brandy soak in. It depends on your own tastes, whether you want it very rich and decadent. I don’t usually do that myself, I like it as it is.

Now the cake is well wrapped in grease-proof paper and foil and stored on a shelf in the larder to steep in its own flavours. A week before Christmas I’ll make the marzipan to go on it. I’ll have a lot of help with that as the children vie to gather up any scraps that fall or are trimmed off. We’ve even converted marzipan haters in the family to our variety of almond paste, just by leaving out the almond essence, which gives the strong almost metallic taste to shop marzipan. Without it the real almond flavour gets a chance to shine through, more mellow and delicately nutty.

On top of the marzipan goes the top layer of royal icing, made with icing sugar and egg white, put on rough to resemble a snowy scene. When I was growing up we had a set of figures for a Nativity scene that always decorated the cake and it was my favourite job to arrange them with a few tiny pine trees for added effect. Nowadays I try to get an African feel by borrowing the children’s little plastic zebra, giraffe and elephant and have them cavorting through the snowy icing – totally incongruous, but then I don’t think the Nativity scene played out among snowdrifts either!

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