What is making me happy: Christmas week and summer holidays

Two Christmas trees are not enough. Also, please note my artful(!) use of vignette: I should not be allowed to play with filters.

I am on holiday now - three weeks of glorious me-time; cooking and sewing and knitting, and planning for Christmas and next year’s projects. Yesterday I put up our beautiful tree, I’ve made some simple mincemeat and we have a fancy free-range ham in the fridge for Christmas Day.

After New Year, Shannon and I are going on holiday for a week with the ever-lovely Nat and Mark - Taupō and then maybe Tauranga. Sunshine is nigh! Exciting because until very recently, Wellington has been proving itself true-to-type in the weather department. *Sighs as though her heart would break* *looks wistfully out the rain-smeared window at the rain with chin in hand*

Related to Christmas planning: I’m also enjoying planting succulents in teacups/stoneware goblets/dessert glasses.

READING:

• Naked by David Sedaris - I bought a copy of this for Nat for her birthday and then borrowed it off her - only to discover three essays-in that I had definitely read it before. I had a look on Good Reads in the vague hope that I’d actually made a note of it and it turns out I'd totally read it in August last year! How about that.
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - long conversation with Mon after I’d read this about loving everything that Margaret Atwood represents but then not really loving the books themselves. There was so much I liked about this book, but I did feel it was a bit laboured.
• The Portable Dorothy Parker - dipping in and out of the short stories, and skipping over most of the poetry. Not keen on poetry, even the comedic rhyming couplet type.
• Always sitting in my reader and making me feel dismayed with my lack of commitment to Serious Reading - Middlemarch and Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography.

WATCHING: A lot (SO MUCH) of Nigella Lawson. On Saturday I watched two series of Nigella's Christmas Kitchen in a row, six episodes in all. I am totally Christmassy right now. I want Poinsettias.

Also! Last night: Home Alone which was better than I remembered.

FAVOURITE PODCAST EPISODE: Fugitive Waves (the Kitchen Sisters) - the Nights of Edith Piaf. SO.GOOD.

The Kitchen Sisters are amaze, also I am fascinated by Edith Piaf's life story. I love a mostly non-narrative/non-editorialising podcast with lots of oral history and primary sources - so: A+++.

KNITTING: I bound off a pocket of my tunic dress and have put it away until next year.

Finally, I began swatching for my Featherweight in Madeline Tosh Lace and the tiny stitches are basically quite terrifying.

SEWING: I have many plans, lots of patterns and a fairly hefty stash - but an empty cutting table. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

LISTENING: Michael Buble’s Christmas album is on high-rotation at the moment. I enjoy his unabashed cheesiness mightily at this time of year.