We have hardly got any snow.
I am going to complain to the council, it is a pretty poor effort. You would think they would manage better than that, especially since it has been the Christmas market in Windermere today.
Of course we went to have a look a the Christmas market once we got up, and wandered about with a great deal of interest.
There were hardly any stalls selling the sort of interesting hand made things that you get in Manchester, and the few that there were were not exactly startling. The Womens’ Institute seemed to have provided some knitting, and somebody had painted some pictures on some logs, and there was some perfume: but that was it.
Everything else was food.
This was really rather splendid. The air was frosty and clear, and the most glorious smells breathed everywhere: roasting pork and woodsmoke and spicy chicken and bubbling hot chocolate. We looked at cheese and home dried sausages and rabbit and haunches of venison, and felt wonderfully seasonal.
We did not buy any of it. I can’t begin to imagine ever purchasing a dead rabbit, especially now that Oliver is a reasonable shot. We don’t bother killing and smoking meat any more, but I still didn’t feel tempted to buy anything that I can do perfectly well myself when the mood takes me. Maybe we will consider doing some farming on our fields when the spring comes.
It was jolly inspiring, and made me feel as though it might be almost Christmas after all. We stopped by one of our neighbours who was dressed as an elf in order to flog mulled wine to visitors, and who seemed to be struggling to twist his face into a seasonal expression. Mark gave him a tenner and told him to fill our cups up, which helped a bit, and so we had mulled wine for breakfast.
Back at home we drank mulled wine and thought about Christmas. We have been so rubbish this year that we hadn’t even decided what to do on Christmas Day. Sometimes we go out, because I think this is the height of wonderful hedonistic decadence, but so far we haven’t booked anywhere, and it is probably getting a bit late.
We pondered this for a while, and eventually we thought that probably we would like to stay at home. We all liked the idea of eating a huge Christmas dinner and then loafing about doing absolutely nothing. We thought that we might watch a bit more of a television series that we have all liked, called A Game Of Thrones.
This has been shown on the sort of television which has channels, so obviously we can’t watch that: but we have bought the series on Amazon and watched bits of it sometimes. It is ages since we watched any of it, though, we thought perhaps about two years ago. We all like it very much indeed, so we thought perhaps we could watch it as a special idle thing to do on Christmas Day. It is brilliant to be able to watch any film you like, in your own home, whenever you like, we live in a wonderful world.
We thought that we would go to the farmers auction before Christmas and buy a goose from there. This would be a ready-dead-and-plucked one, which is easiest, because unless you are saving the feathers for something they make an awful mess. I don’t mind going to auctions with Mark, because he has been a farmer, and knows how all the nodding and nose-scratching works. We can go and do this sort of thing again now, because we have got a farm holding number, and so the agricultural auction will let us bid on things.
This cheered us up a lot, and made Christmas sound jolly promising. Mark went outside to split some logs to keep the house warm, and I made cinnamon pastry to bake into mince pies.
I made seven dozen.
Mark has eaten a lot of them already, but it is still a respectable quantity of mince pies. Some of them have been frozen ready to cook later, and some of them have been cooked and put into tins. I will have to make next year’s mincemeat soon, because it needs to soak for a year.
I was very pleased, I can consider my price to be above rubies now.
I have made a proper start on Christmas.
LATER NOTE: The observant may notice that although the text says that the day was frosty and clear, the picture is not, not at all.
This is because it is one o’clock in the morning, the pictures we took won’t download, and I have become bored. You can have last year’s picture again.
