Nowhere fast

Every year when the month of December is in sight, I start looking forward to Christmas! Get away with you, I can hear you think, you don't even like Christmas. You admitted as much in your last post! I can almost see the eye rolls in my mind's eye ...

Well, it isn't so much Christmas itself I am looking forward to, but the ensuing holidays, as our office always closes for a week or so.

As the weeks leading up to Christmas are usually the busiest of the whole year, I breathed a sigh of relief when last Friday I closed the door upon the mountains of paperwork and the miniature Christmas tree I put up to humour my Christmas loving colleague.

Nine days without any plans whatsoever except not getting up at the crack of dawn and not having to live under the tyranny of the clock. No overcrowded buses and no Christmas Zombies ...  Pure bliss!

Apart from a quick dash to the shops on Saturday, to pick up an order, we'd planned to stay firmly ensconced inside Dove Cottage, especially as the weather was far from inviting us to venture outside.

Indeed, we were going nowhere fast!

On Christmas Day, we have our own tradition, which involves lounging around in our pyamas for most of the day.

Not any old pyamas, mind you. We prefer doing things in style! I wore a full length vintage quilted nylon dressing gown from Think Twice and Jos's chique dressing gown is a vintage St. Michael one found in a charity shop!

The vintage slip I wore underneath was another charity shop find.

We weren't the only ones in pyamas and no, I don't mean Phoebe ...

These 1960s and early 1970s Mattel dolls are dressed in nightwear of the era!

We started the day as we meant to go on, with a leisurely breakfast, followed by a menu of daytime television, reading and listening to some music.

Elvis's Christmas album, which Jos, who used to be a huge fan at the time, bought in the1950s, had its yearly outing. Which is more than enough, I should say!

By dinner time, we dressed up for a festive meal in honour of my dad. No special outfit was planned. I just stood in front of my wardrobe and pulled out this orange polka dotted dress, which I combined with a navy blue cardigan. As a nod to Christmas I pinned on a sparkly reindeer brooch.

Speaking of sparkly, we started off dinner with drinks served in vintage Babycham glasses.

As a starter, we made a retro-style prawn cocktail, which we served in vintage beer glasses found at my dad's!

We also used my parents' dinner service for the first time, which I admit felt a bit weird. I even got a lump in my throat taking the plates out of our cupboard as, after all, this time last year we were still doing the same thing at my dad's ...

Ending this post on a positive note, we're raising our glasses (only Jos couldn't wait) to spending Christmas exactly how we like it.

Hope yours was everything you expected it to be.

Cheers!