Hello everybody! Hope you all had a lovely Christmas, despite the strange times that we’re living in, and I hope that at least some of you managed to meet up with family and friends that you might not have seen for quite a while.
As I told you in my post last week, Christmas was suddenly sneaking up on Mum faster than she expected and she was in quite a mad spin, trying to get everything done in time. Well, to no one’s surprise, she didn’t manage it – but it wasn’t all her fault!
In the middle of December she started to think about trimming the house up for Christmas. She knew she didn’t have room to put the big tree up this year, but thought she’d make the windows look really nice. When she tried her old trimmings, however, she thought they looked very tatty – and, even worse, they kept falling off the windows and so she decided to order some more online.
These two lovely hedgehogs arrived almost by return of post from the Natural History Museum in London and soon made themselves at home in the corner of the window where they could watch people walking by.
Mum also ordered lots of stars and two pretty Christmas lanterns from another online retailer, who said they’d arrive on December 19th. Then she got a message to say they’d arrive on either December 21st or 22nd. Even then she’d have had time to make everything looked nice and Christmassy, but now it’s New Year’s Eve and there’s still no sign of them…and the lantern she’s had for a couple of years looks a bit lonely by itself…
At the same time, she ordered herself a pretty new dress for Christmas from another online retailer and that arrived at exactly the time they said it would. There was only one problem – it was the wrong dress! In her haste, Mum had clicked on 3 instead of 2 when she was typing up the order and, although it was a pretty enough dress, it wasn’t what she’d wanted – and when she tried to reorder, the one she’d really wanted had sold out in her size…
She thought she’d got it right when she ordered some food from one of the supermarkets in the nearby town, however, as everything looked so good in their Christmas book. She ordered lots of prepacked veg, thinking that it would just need microwaving on Christmas Day while the rest could go in the freezer in case the weather turned bad.
All seemed well when one of Mum’s friends kindly collected it and brought it to the house for her. The only problem was where to store everything until Mum had time to deal with it, as the fridge was crammed full and was getting to the point where it was going to automatically de-frost itself soon – and the milkman had done a double delivery so that he could take Christmas Day off.
Luckily Mum’s house is quite old and has deep windowsills, so she was able to put quite a lot of stuff there and know it would keep fresh for a couple of days. Then disaster struck!
On Christmas Eve afternoon, she walked into the kitchen, intending to wash up, and found a pool of water on the floor – the fridge had chosen that moment to start defrosting itself!
She rushed upstairs to change into some old clothes to start mopping up, but in her haste she pulled the curtains too hard and they shot off the end of the curtain rail…
Back downstairs, she mopped up the first lot of water and started taking what she could out of the fridge and finding new temporary storage places for it. Then, when she finally got round to washing-up, she found that the drain from the kitchen sink was blocked…
Both me and Mum know that these are only very little problems compared with what so many people had to cope with this year, but when you’re already struggling for time they seem enormous – and it got worse!
On Christmas Day the fridge was still de-frosting itself, but at least it had more less stopped making puddles on the kitchen floor. Mum began to think that cooking Christmas dinner was going to be quite straightforward – once again she was wrong!
With everything ready but the potatoes and veg, she discovered that they weren’t cooked and ready to go in the microwave as she’d expected, but were actually raw and needed cooking for at least an hour in the oven with equipment she didn’t possess!
As a result, we had Quiche Lorraine and baked beans for tea on Christmas Day…
…and had our Christmas dinner on Boxing Day…
…though we’d to wait for the day after that before we could have the trifle as it took the fridge over 48 hours to totally defrost itself and get back to a temperature at which the jelly would set. (And Mum rather overdid it with the sherry in the trifle. It tasted good, but you’d have failed the breathalyser test after eating a plateful!)
As you can imagine, all this chaos made Mum get a bit sweary – and what she said to the poor frying-pan after it fell out of the cupboard and landed on her foot was so rude that I went bright pink all over and had to pull my hat down over my ears.
But, despite the problems, I had a great time. Ali’s mum – who is an honorary member of Team Wilf – made me this lovely Elf hat (though I’m still waiting for my mum to make me a jumper to go with it)…
and Ali bought me a yummy chocolate cake…
while my lovely friend Denise in Australia sent me a Christmas card of my very own…
And, though she sometimes embarrasses me and threatens to shut me in a drawer or even put me in the chip-pan, I love my mum to bits and so I got Ali to help me get this special magic mug made just for her.
It just looks to be plain black at first glance, but just watch what happens when she pours a hot drink into it…
That’s all for today, except to say that I hope your Christmas went more smoothly than ours. Take care, stay safe – and look out for my New Year’s message very soon!
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31/12/2020
Wilf the bear-faced blogger 