Christmas comes to our house

This year we have an exceptionally busy Christmas so I have had to be much more organised than usual.

Tonight we have our annual get together of twenty friends. We all club together to cover the cost and we are supplying the mains and desserts (being the caterers) and another couple are hosting at their house and getting in the booze and doing a cheese board. They are supplying bed and breakfast for some of the couples and we are supplying bed and breakfast for one couple (dear friends from Dorset).

We are all meeting up tomorrow for a pub lunch before everyone goes on their way again. Some of the friends are far flung and this is an annual chance for us all to meet up and catch up with each other. Tomorrow we also have to fit in preparing Monday’s lunches.

Next Saturday we have a wedding for a hundred and fifty people, this has been booked since the spring. We are doing an afternoon tea on our vintage crockery then they will have a hog roast in the evening. This means a lot of time leading up to it will be spent getting everything ready. We also have a lunch for twenty on the same day which I will deliver in the morning and it will be going into their fridge until later.

A few days before Christmas we are doing the full turkey Christmas dinner and all the trimmings for my husbands family (and exchanging and opening gifts) and on the same morning we are delivering a finger buffet for a hundred for a memorial service (which we will have prepared the day before).

We will then do the whole  turkey Christmas dinner again a few days after Christmas for my family (along with exchanging and opening gifts) and have also had a party enquiry for that day too.

With all this going on I needed to get ahead of the game so I started Christmas shopping earlier than usual and by the first week of December I had bought and wrapped all the gifts, written all the cards and posted everything that needed to be posted.

All that remained was to get the Christmas tree and decorate the house. Yesterday afternoon we bought a tree and I set about decorating it.

We have a Christmas tree

The lights are on and the fairy is on the top

The tree is decorated

The final touch, the gifts are under the tree

It looks a lot of gifts but it is for all our family including the grandchildren. Now we are ready for Christmas! We have a lot of work to squeeze in over the Christmas period but the house is ready.