life in the Limousin

There isn’t a problem writing the blog tonight - it’s something to take my mind off putting up the christmas decorations. Is it really still too early?
Apart from the modern perennial of the father christmas on neon ladder set-up, hanging randomly from the occasional wall, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of anything else. The fir trees which are donated by the commune to each of the shops in the village remain baubleless. I think everyone’s waiting for it to become more wintery before taking the plunge but apart from getting a tiny bit colder it still doesn’t feel that christmas is only a couple of weeks away. Not even the Marché de Noel that we went to yesterday in St Laurent sur Gorre, where father christmas, sporting a nylon wig that was on the bluer side of white, rode around the streets on a camel could do the job.
When I was growing up in Manchester, where people seemed to go early with the tinsel, the christmas tree was always put up on the 5th of December because it’s my birthday but when it came to taking the decorations down life seemed so dull without the glitter having lived with it for so long that now I try to limit the fun to 2 weeks max.
Time spent not putting up decorations was then, this birthday, spent in bed eating chocolates and drinking tea until past 11am, a bit of post lunch toing and froing to football etc with the kids, followed by a televisual odyssey which began at 5.30pm with Come dine with me, travelled past You’ ve been Framed, Harry Hill, the X Factor finally arrived at Being Alan Bennett late in the evening - all washed down with Matt’s Saturday night speciality of Magret de Canard in an apple jus, a bottle of Champagne and more chocolates. I defy anyone to invent a better birthday than that. In fact don’t bother - it can’t be done. In fact the only thing that could have made my day even more complete had already happened the week before when I received my Michael Winner christmas card, signed in thick blue felt pen by the old pantomime dame himself. He’d mentioned in his Winner’s dinners column a couple of weeks ago that if people sent him their address he’d send them a card and he’s nothing if not a man of his word. It has taken pride of place in the card collection ever since - but as we only have 4 it isn’t that difficult. I shall, of course, be framing said article when the festive season comes to an end so that life retains some of it’s glitter.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Helen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.