Tuesday December 18, 2007
Yesterday I dragged Graham out to help with my pre-Christmas essentials shop. That’s the one where I make sure we have enough tea and coffee and staples of all kinds to see us through the famine days between Christmas and New Year. Nothing worse than sitting down on Christmas Eve after the very last shop of all, only to discover you’ve run out of tea.
Egg nog, yes. Tea, no. And the frantic buying public will have bought everything even remotely resembling bread and other basics, leaving empty shelves behind them, shelves that take until the end of the first week in January to get back to normal.
So, before I buy Christmas provisions, I do the basics.
We’ve decided that this year we’ll not go nuts on luxury foodstuffs. Graham no longer has the appetite for it, and I really don’t need the calories. So long as you have a nice bird on the table for Christmas Lunch, and a decent bit of roasted ham for Boxing Day, sensible folks don’t need much else. Oh, and a bottle of something nice to toast the Queen and another to toast the New Year. And a steady but modest stream of plonk to keep you going through it all.
It’s not a matter of being mean. Nor is it a matter of being short of Christmas spirit–we’re doing rather well on Christmas spirit now we’ve settled down to it. No, it’s about treading lightly, on the planet, and on our own systems.
Gluttony at Christmas used to be fun. It isn’t any more, not here in the little brick house, it’s not.
The author, webmaster, and minder of the cat