You know...

...it's definitely closer to Christmas when you are sitting in a restaurant with your colleagues enjoying your annual Christmas meal!

Last night the six of us went to The Old Bank in town and had a thoroughly good meal in a classy yet comfortable restaurant with very attentive staff.  The only thing was that the live music was rather loud and we had to shout across the table somewhat!

Anyway, I don't often have a three course meal as I can't eat that much for one meal, but I did my best!  I started off with carrot and coriander soup with very tasty croutons (they were big, but there were only three!!!), then I had the traditional turkey - the sausage stuffing was delicious, pudding was a bread and butter pudding with almonds and Baileys - the top was lovely and crunchy and it was hot enough to  melt the icecream in the most delicious manner!

As we did the year previous, we decided to do a Secret Santa gift exchange so that the whole gift giving thing doesn't get too expensive.  However, I managed to mess it up!! I don't quite know what happened, but one woman got two gifts and one didn't get anything!!! Whoops!!! Fortunately we managed to sort it out by giving the extra gift to the woman without anything.

I felt so very bad about it, but I think that I have worked out how it happened - basically I had written names on a piece of paper and asked those of us (four out of the six) at work to choose a name and then I decided to make labels for the gifts so that we couldn't work out our Secret Santa by the handwriting. 

What I think I did was typed out the same name twice and didn't spot it, the I compounded the error by throwing away the last two slips of handwritten paper  because I assumed that the two labels I had left would match.  Whoops - oh well, a lesson learnt there!!

I should also point out that I got EXACTLY what I wanted for the Secret Santa gift. Do you know how I managed that? I picked by own name!! The thing is that not only did I pick my own name, but I somehow managed to pick it three times (when I picked first, when I then picked again after three were chosen, then again when the second to last got picked), so it was clearly meant to be!! (No cheating involved at all I promise!!)  And what did I get?  A Cuttlebug embossing folder and a die as well a star stamp for my cardmaking hobby - perfect!!