A midwinter night's Christmas
Ally over here has mentioned a Christmas in July that our community group recently had and how it all works. I hosted one of those dinners at my house. The only problem is that my friends and I never made it to the second leg, so it didn't work out quite so well in that regard at my end, but I had a very pleasant evening with people from work.
I don't usually have Christmas at my house and so simply don't own much in the way of Christmas decorations. What this meant is that on the day I went racing around looking for some. Thankfully I just so happened to have crocheted some placemats earlier in the year in a cherry red, which I decided would do (pictured).
Those small coloured blobs you see in the photo are my one Christmas decorating specialty (not quite so classy as the chandelier decorations at the other house - I wonder if I can still scavenge one of those?). They're made with red and green cellophane, jaffas, spearmint leaves and pipe cleaners (if you'd like more instructions than that just ask me). You can scatter them about, hang them over a wine glass, add them to the tree, give them to people etc.
Then I bought some "twinkle twig" from Freedom to use for a Christmas tree. And I am going to add to that when Christmas comes around.
I also thought I'd buy turkey. I should have done my research earlier because what I wasn't prepared for (or temporarily forgot) was the fact that this would be frozen and would require 24-36 hours to defrost. So, in the end I cooked frozen turkey, because that's all I could find, but it turned out quite fine.
I ended up with four friends from work coming over: L1 who is late 40s, divorced, two teenage kids (one of whom is mildy intellectually impaired and will never be a completely independent adult) and who writes poetry in her spare time; L2 who is in her early 30s and immigrated here from Scotland for "cultural and political" reasons and who has a law degree but is writing a movie script in her spare time and taking screen-writing courses; M1 who is one of only two guys in my team, somewhere in his thirties, and really wants to be a landscape/urban planner (as you can tell, none of us are entirely sold out to the cause around here!) and M2 who is in her early 20s and was adopted from Korea as a baby - she's the quiet one but the rest of us manage to suck her into stuff. We all sit together at work and get on really well and they are actually all really good at being socially inclusive and so on. And it was their idea to do a Kris Kringle thing, which was a bit of fun.
The reason we didn't make it to the dessert leg is because M1 had been out till 6:30 am that morning (yes, some people still do that!) and was going to go home, L1 had to be somewhere at 7:00 am the following Sunday morning because she was on the committee and had to set up (and I thought it was only churches who required that of people! :) ...), L2 actually came to my house from a party down the hall in my apartment block and was going to go back down there but never did, and M2 was going on in to the city for some friend's birthday and set off for there at about 11:15 pm. So, then I felt like I could hardly kick them out of the house - and I must be getting old because by the time they'd all left sometime after 11, I wasn't really in for going on to the next bit. So maybe I need to work out how you ensure people come on for the dessert leg next time.
But we had a good night. I have socialised with work friends quite a bit - mainly only the two Ls - but never had them in my home before, so in some ways it was crossing a frontier, but they were all really appreciative of this (and gave me a bottle of port from Portugal as a present!) and seemed to really enjoy themselves.