Saturday was Our Christmas. When you travel around loads there are always a couple of presents that can’t be taken with us so we keep them back for Our Christmas, traditionally on the Saturday after New Year. It started back when we lived in Jersey but kept it going. Now we are in France the tradition is really coming into its own. We really couldn’t transport our presents to each other, especially when the return journey was via Eurostar. But it means we get lots of Xmases….it is a long post so maybe make a cup of tea and get a biscuit!
It started on Xmas morning, waking up in Beaconsfield and Santa having successfully found us, we headed off to Gloucester for a rather unusual Christmas Day. This beautiful rainbow guided us on our way…
Christmas Day is also Auntie Kathryn’s birthday and this year it was a big birthday. Auntie Kathryn wanted to have her birthday all day and have a birthday party on her birthday with her family. So instead of having Christmas Dinner we had a meal in an Asian restaurant with no Crackers and Christmas pudding. It made Auntie Kathryn very happy.
We had fun too. We sat next to our cousin Callum and had Indian food which was very nice. (Euan says except the chicken which made his mouth tingle but big cousin Kieron ate it up so it didn’t go to waste – in fact Kieron ate anything that we couldn’t eat, he is a big teenager who plays rugby and is very cool).
Then it was a party at Auntie Kathryn’s house where she opened presents, we played in the dark garden with Socks and played with big cuddly Polar Bears in the living room, watched Callum do magic, popped loads of party poppers making quite a colourful mess and ate lots of Celebrations cos Auntie Kathryn had put them in little bowls around the living room. Callum ate the Quality Street – we shared nicely!
Auntie Kathryn and Natalie (our biggest cousin) went to New York for their special birthdays. Natalie was 21 a couple of days after Xmas. We gave them something special for their trip to New York. It is supposed to be very very cold in New York in the Winter so we also bought them matching very warm hats so they would be warm and could find each other!! We hope they had lots of fun.
We had a lovely Boxing Day pretending to be Christmas Day with Gloucester Grandma. We spent lots of time in the garden helping with wood, we love chopping wood with Dad in Grandma’s garden. And we went to the woods to find more wood. We opened presents by the fire and had special dinner with proper Xmas pudding. Yummy!! Euan doesn’t like it but one day he will. He just hasn’t grown into it. He doesn’t like mince pies either!! All the more for everyone else!
The next day we drove to Scottish Grandma and Grandad’s. Uncles Kevin and James were there and Auntie Kerrie, Andy and Kristian and Korey came too. It was like Christmas Day again. Kristian gave out all the presents very fast and took the labels off so nobody knew who had given them what present. He wanted to help unwrap everyone’s presents too. It was lots of fun.
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Soon it was time to drive back to Beaconsfield to get ready to go back to France but we stopped in to see Great Uncle Neil and Great Auntie Linda. We got Linda a fluffy hat to wear when they go to watch Ipswich play at Portman Road. Uncle Neil does a radio show about being a grumpy old man (we don’t know how cos when we see him is always smiling except when we get him to say the banned word – ask him what it is next time you see him – he falls for it every time!!) so we bought him some Monsieur Grincheux boxer shorts (that’s Mr Grumpy in French) – he loved them!!
We got the Eurostar back to Paris with Uncle Mike and when we got home we found that Santa had been to Maisons-Laffitte too. He had found our advent calendar and left us chocolate coins in the pockets where we leave him a fun little thing every day during advent. And he left us a big jar of peanut butter and a little bag of presents in our bedroom – cool! We also found Martin and Julia who had come to spend New Year with us too. We don’t think Santa brought them – they came by boat and by train via Dieppe, they had an adventure to find us.
To finish Christmas off we had ‘Our Xmas’ – we went for a fun walk in the woods and it was so warm it felt like spring, we could have had a picnic. We gave each other our presents to each other and had a yummy dinner – it got so late though we had to postpone Dad’s Xmas present Xmas pudding until Sunday night. It was sad to take down the Xmas decorations on Sunday but we have been very lucky and had lots of Xmases.
But maybe more about the weekend in another post as your tea is probably finished and you might have to go and do something else. Bye for now. Thank you to all the people that made our Christmases – all of them – special and for all the presents. They are awesome.
The Millards in Paris 