The christian festival is upon us, the time of peace and goodwill to all men. The time of giving gifts, and making time for the nearest and dearest.

I am all for that, but this year Tricia and I seem to be struggling with time and expectation… normally we have wrapped everything by now, and we can just enjoy the time of year. We haven’t bought everything yet, let alone wrapped it. I suppose once it has been done I will move out of the humbug phase.

When Robbie and Nikki were younger they had a stocking each. They were knitted and very festive (as you might expect with a xmas stocking). One was green and one was red. What they didn’t know, was that Tricia and I had bought two of each. So whilst they had their stockings on Xmas eve, the duplicates were in the loft already filled, so all ‘Santa’ had to do on Xmas eve when they were asleep was swap them over. Nice and easy. Ellie, has a Santa sack. Tricia and I did the same thing and bought a duplicate. This has worked well. However, last weekend when getting the decorations down, I inadvertantly got the bag with the stockings and sacks in. Ellie rifled through and discovered she had two sacks….. with the intensity of a Sun journalist we had to face a hard line in questioining from Ellie. What with the ‘playground talk’ I am not sure now who is fooling who, is Ellie just playing along with us about Santa, or is she buying into the Santa idea….

In other news, Ninja has not been up the Xmas tree since Sunday evening. Hopefully the stern talking to I gave to him has been taken on board, I’m not sure if he understood the words ‘take to the vet and be put down’ but I am sure he understood the tone . His sister however, has been found to be taking chocolate decorations off the tree! Knocking them off and trying to nibble them. It wasn’t Ellie after all !