Winter

Winter nights always make me think of the way Pops used to start a story "it was a dark and stormy night..." It makes me smile even now as I always used to fall for his sneaky joke! It goes something like this

"It was a dark and stormy night, and there were three men in a cave; one man turned to the other and said .....It was a dark and stormy night...."

I fell for it every single time because I was always keen to hear another story from Pops as he was a good story teller. In the end though, I got wise to him!!

Anyway, that wasn't actually the point of this post, the point was to complain about how dark it gets, I was driving along the road at about 4:30pm and wondering just when did it get dark before 5pm!! It's no wonder people get depressed in the winter with dark morning and darker evenings!

Having said that, for the most part I quite like dark evenings as I can draw the curtains, light the candles (away from the curtains mind you!), make a cup of tea and just snuggle up with the cat - preferably with a good book in my hand!! And that was precisely what I did yesterday - I even had the TV turned off and Clannad playing in the background - it was bliss.

Of course, Dad will say that the best evenings are when we have come home from walking the dog and the wind is beginning to get up, but we are snug in the house with the fire going and lots of tea and toast to be had. (it goes without saying that the wet and somewhat smelly dog stays in the kitchen!!)

The best thing about winter though, has to be Christmas! As you may have gathered from previous posts, I am a bit of a Christmas nutter! I love the whole thing - the run up to Christmas with the present buying (although that can get a bit stressful!), making Christmas cards, making crackers, putting up the tree and all the rest of it.

I never tire of it, I do get a bit fed up when I start seeing Christmas stuff in the shops in August, but I get into the swing of it all by the end of November when I have usually already got a few presents tucked away in the house and am beginning to think about what design to use for my Christmas cards. I even begin to work out which Carol concerts or services I can go do; and this year I am going to a doozy of a concert - this one is Carols by Candlelight at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Ann, Trish and I are going on Sunday 23rd December, as near as Christmas as we could get it!! I have never been to a concert at the Albert Hall and so I am really looking forward to it, if I am not in the mood for Christmas by then (unlikely I know!) then this should do it for me!! ;-)