Today is the first day of my Christmas holidays (hooray!).  Only I don’t seem to have been touched by the Christmas spirit, so I decided to have a festive day out.  If the spirit wasn’t going to find me, I’d hunt it down…

It didn’t start well.  It started in a rather bleak way in fact (I was only walking through the churchyard from the car park…I’ve not started hanging round them on my days off, just in case you were wondering.)

Which I counter balanced by going into the church. Happily it was lovely, but still not terribly cheery…

So I went to my favourite village and visited a huge number of overpriced shops where I had to triple check the price tag (cushion for £79.99 anyone?!) And the master plan developed.  I decided to visit all the gift shops between this village and mine as they were the most likely to be festive and full of festive type people.

And boy, were they…

I even got carried away and treated myself to a Christmas jumper (no picture as it is a Christmas jumper in the slight scary sense and I am warm but that could be embarrassment.  Even the cats went out when I put it on :o) )

What made me feel really festive though was:

1)     A very lovely friend who doesn’t have a computer (I print them off the posts every few weeks and post them to her) called today out of the blue to thank me for all the blogs this year.

2)     Some other lovely blog readers sent me a bottle of wine to say thanks for the blog.

3)     And a whole heap of you on face book have demonstrated to me that I have some really, really lovely friends.

So the church may have been peaceful and pretty, the decorations lovely and the jumper…well, maybe the least said about the jumper the better…but actually, the thing that has made me feel most festive is you lot.   And the mulled wine.  The mulled wine has definitely helped too…

:o)