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Tuesday 8 January 2008

Christmas

Well what a lovely Christmas. Christmas celebrations always go on forever in my family as my mum selfishly has her birthday on the 27th. Therefore I had a four day stretch of joy and then was rudely back in the real world on the 28th when apparently it was unacceptable to eat miniature heroes for breakfast (not that I was up for breakfast –I nearly had a heart attack when the alarm went off on Monday morning, especially as I was given an alarm clock that plays your ipod. I have it on random and so was woken up to Joy Division playing very loudly. May need to change my sheets when I get home). But it was lovely. Went to see my Dad’s nativity. Sadly it was one of those hip and groovy ones and I couldn’t follow it. Was more amused on Christmas morning when someone set their High School Musical Singing Doll off in the middle of communion. Vicar: “And so we break the bread” High School Musical Singing Doll “We’re breaking Free!!”. I laughed, the Vicar didn’t, but I think all were agreed it was excellent timing.

We’ve always played games at Christmas in our family. I generally spend most of the year growing back hair that’s been lost in a particularly vicious game of musical hats. However for the last couple of years we’ve played a game that my brother has picked up from somewhere. People get in to two teams and each person has to write down, on separate bits of paper, 8 names. Names are folded and go in to a hat and then people take it in turns to describe who is on the bit of paper to their teams, each person has a minute and you keep going till all the names are gone. Make a note of how many each team got. All the names go back in the hat. Next round, same names, same format but you have to mime what is on the bit of paper. Make a note of the scores. Next round, same names, same format but you have to describe the person in one word. End of game. Quite a lot of fun. You need to be careful who you put down though, one year a lot of people were traumatized after my dad mimed Monica Lewinski. We also wasted a lot of time trying to guess the person my sister in law was describing. Apparently he was a Freedom Fighter in the Second World War, possibly French, either way he flew a plane and was some sort of national hero. Turns out she meant Liberace. Which was not as bad as playing with my nan, who come the one word round decided to describe people by saying “woman”, “man”, “old”. She attempted to redeem herself by suggesting a game where people have to name different types of fuel. I think we were allowed the telly on then.



New year was also super. I went on a boat down the Thames. I held off mentioning my plans until I was back on dry land as every person I spoke to about it (thank you Mother) said “oooh like the Marchioness”. Well, hopefully not. It was great. And as we got off the boat me and my mate got all smug and said how clever we were to pre-book a taxi. Yes, very clever. Until all the roads are closed, you haven’t got a coat and are wearing high heels and have to walk for 2 hours to find said taxi. I suffered from excruciatingly sore feet, someone else suffered from cold and someone else was about to wet themselves. Some girls cried, some boys became smug about wearing flat shoes. I merely became incredibly British and marched around saying things like “well crying about it isn’t going to get us home is it” and “well stopping isn’t going to get us there any faster”, whilst secretly thinking we were going to have to sleep in a doorway. 2 metres away from the cab I threw myself down a hole and became convinced I had broken my ankle. Not due to the way I fell, merely that intense cold had caused it to snap. Luckily, big fat leg to the rescue, it was just bruised and I lived to fight another day.
Next new year I shall be at home in my pyjamas.