I have been making sweets out of boiled apples.
They turned out rather stickier than I would have liked, because I don’t think I boiled them for long enough. This is a nuisance because I had thought that I might give some to people for Christmas. Mark tried one and said that they were far too sticky to give to anybody and I should just leave them in the fridge and he would kindly help out by clearing them up for me.
However I don’t think they are that sticky and people can always wash their hands when they have eaten one, so I will wrap them up in something like a plastic bag and warn everybody to keep them in the fridge. They are quite nice but a bit like apple marmalade, and look a bit troubling, food which comes in shapeless brown puddles is not especially enticing, it’s a good job it’s the thought that counts.
I have been experimenting quite a bit with Christmas cooking, making chocolate snowmen and things. This all sounds very organised but actually Mark has eaten almost everything I have made already, and it is too early to start doing Christmas things anyway, but I wanted to try out some recipes to see if they worked. Real Christmas cooking has got to be done carefully, so that it is exactly right, and then hidden in a tin and shoved somewhere where he can’t find it until at least the middle of December.
In fact I am not doing too badly with the whole Christmas thing. I have made a lot of mince pie pastry and frozen it, and I have given Mark my list of things I would like to get for Christmas. Top of the list was a new woolly hat and scarf, and today I saw the very perfect ones, e-mailed to me by some marketing company who has got my tastes nailed down brilliantly, beautiful soft grey cashmere. However they were £185 for the pair, and didn’t even include gloves. I showed Mark anyway, just in case, and he laughed, and suggested that I put them on his credit card in the January sales because he would probably be past caring by then.
You have probably gathered that I am very excited about Christmas coming. It is my very favourite time of year, I love the long nights and the candles and the smell of logs and the fire crackling in the stove, and cinnamon and oranges and all the other brilliant things about winter. I have got a new perfume that I am going to wear for Christmas. We bought it in the summer, and I have been saving it for ages, because it is beautiful and spicy and perfect, and I don’t want to associate the smell with anything else. It is called Ninevah, and every now and again I take the lid off and just breathe it in, and think about happy times to come.
In just a few days now it will be all right to think about Christmas officially, it is not really allowed until it is actually December, but I can never wait that long, regular readers will remember that I first started on the excited countdown of Christmas preparations somewhere around the middle of March. Christmas Day is now only a month away, and now that it is nearly here it is lovely. I can make cards and plan variations on cakes with a completely clear conscience.
We have promised Oliver that he can decorate the tree on his next exeat. Lucy will not be home then, because she does not have any more time out until Christmas, but she said she would prefer not to decorate the tree anyway and just arrive home to a readymade winter wonderland. I am sad about this because I like decorating the tree all together, but mildly relieved as well because Lucy is a complete pain when she is engaged in compulsory helpfulness. We always get our tree from the same place, a local farmer who is a friend of Mark’s who has some reindeer milling around in the spirit of seasonal cheerfulness. He takes them round all the school fetes with Father Christmas every year, invariably we see him at five or six places every December and then not at all for the next eleven months.
There is only a month left!
I am so excited I keep smiling to myself about it.
Nearly Christmas…
