Hello chaps!
Now I know I have been beyond rubbish when it comes to actually doing any blogs for the last few months, and for this I apologise most profusely! (Setting up your own business takes time, energy and a lot of biscuits!) But of course I couldn’t let the Christmas season slink on by in a flutter of glitter and cake (Mmmm, cake!) without a few words on the subject….
So what does Christmas and New Year mean to me? Well, pretty much what it means to everyone else: The insane panic of the forgotten presents, random family members popping up when you least expect them, chocolate, pink fizz, and the same films and tv programs every year……
Now this may seem tedious and slightly boring to say we watch the same programs every year, but Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without at least one episode of the Vicar of Dibley (Think an abundance of Christmas dinners and Dawn French squeeeezing that last mangy looking sprout in between her teeth!)
We even have a Home Alone night every year where I, The Brother and The Parents sit down to watch Home Alone 1 and 2 (Not 3-No Macaulay Culkin? How rude!) and laugh in exactly the same places as last year! Over the years as The Parent has got a bit older, he grumbles if we make him watch a film in the evening; yet with The Home Alones he chuckles along with the rest of us, and it is now a firm Family Tradition!
Other Family Traditions include stockings in the bed on Christmas morning (Yes I know The Brother and I add up to nearly sixty, but we will do this til one of us ambles off to have a family of our own!) Over the years this Family Tradition has improved considerably; it now includes a snazzy bottle of fizz usually balanced precariously in the duvet, to go with the stocking stalwarts of:
Chocolate coins (get scoffed as soon at they get pulled out of said stocking!)
A Toothbrush (Father Christmas always gets the specific make wrong but hey, he tries!)
A scratch card (I’ve won a small amount once in 13 years)
A chocolate FC (I bite his head off first, oops never mind!)
An apple and an orange (I think FC picked this one up from when The Parents were young whippersnappers….a nod to healthy eating at Christmas!? They never get eaten, and The Brother once left his in his stocking for a whole year….Mouldy wasn’t a descriptive enough word for what was left!)
There is of course different little pressies every year too.
About 5 years ago I noticed that Father Christmas was doing a wonderful job with everybody’s stocking, including his own…
SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU ARE YOUNG ENOUGH TO BE UPSET BY THE ACTUAL ORIGIN OF FC BEING MY MOTHER, LOOK AWAY NOW!
What? That’s not how a spoiler works? Eh? Oh! I’m supposed to give a warning THEN tell them the news! Oh well…..Ooops.
So I took over her stocking so she didn’t have to open presents she’d wrapped a mere 7 hours beforehand and look excited! Now she really is excited with the small random bits I collect for her, and everybody’s happy! (Especially after the fizz at 8am, whoop!)
Inevitably, the actual job of filling our stockings fell to me. I am always the last one awake on Christmas Eve, so I get to actually be FC! I am sorry to say there’s no mince pies, sherry or costumes involved, yet I am stupidly excited as though I was a little girl-so this makes up for the lack in traditional dress and nosh!
Now the naughty person that is The Brother encouraged me to the last glass of Fizz in the bottle before heading to his bed, so let’s just say I was a tiny bit Merry Christmas at this point! Rustling bags whilst giggling and muttering HO HO HO under my breath, I filled each stocking with goodies, sprinkling a liberal quantity of monetary chocolate: the real currency of the world!
That’s what I thought I was doing anyway…..!
What was really happening was the following: I was ambling about shoving pressies in willy nilly, managed to let my stocking fall through the banisters and knock into a photo frame that resides on a ledge on the stairs and send it crashing to it’s noisy demise at the bottom!
Stealthy wasn’t quite the word!
And so to the title of this particular blog: Almost Midnight Pancakes!
A new yet hopefully annual tradition that popped up on New Year’s Eve this year! It was all down to The Parent planning one pudding but not quite making it with the right ingredients, pancakes being the next best (and available) alternative!
Have you ever tried making (and flipping in a slightly drunken yet very hilarious manner) pancakes at almost midnight on NYE? No? Well I thoroughly recommend it!
So the recurring theme throughout Christmas just might have been fizz in various forms and quantities…I think I’m off to do some sort of detox thing…..Orange squash and Macaroons I think!
I hope you all had a cracking festive season, and if anyone has any annoying friends who are counting down to next Christmas as I have…Tell them to put a sock in it! (Or should that be a mouldy fruit stocking!?!)
Love,
Fatty Blob Head
