A bit buggered

It really is over. The Monday alarm rang rudely at 5.45am. The kids are back in school, Husband is off to Singapore this afternoon and I've got design work and words to write.

After the bus had carted the kids off, I said to Husband “That’s it then. It’s back to normal. I’ll have to take the tree down today.” I’ve never been one to observe the twelfth night rule – I don’t even know when it is. Twelfth night in our family meant ‘Twelfth Night’ by William Shakespeare.

He looked at me a bit oddly.

“What?”

“You haven’t noticed have you?” he said.

“Have you done it?”

“You really haven’t noticed? I did it on Friday morning. I took everything down and packed it away.”

I had to go down the hall to the sitting room to check. Three days! I really do worry about my observational skills. I mean, aren’t writers supposed to notice everything and everybody?

I might be a bit buggered then.

Yo ho ho

I saw my first Christmas decorations in Bangkok this year around the 28/29 October. I think it was a record.

We are purists when it comes to Christmas trees: only REAL will do.

Then we moved to Thailand where there is a distinct lack of choice: Non-drop, traditional, Nordman fir, Frasier Fir, Norway Spruce, Blue Spruce, Scots Pine?

Nope. Here, it’s no tree or fake tree.

Rabidly against fake trees, in our first year we found a distant relative of the fir tree in one of the garden centres. I think its genetic similarity was tenuous. It had pine needles and droopy branches. All the baubles slid down the branches overnight and had to be replaced every morning. The tree couldn’t cope with our Western need for air conditioning – we’d only been here a few months – and it got sicker and sicker, dropping its needles, and then the baubles wouldn’t wait until night time to fall off.

The following year we caved.

Yesterday we built our tree (you have no idea of the pain it causes me to say this out loud.)