A fun Xmas party

December 22.12. 2013

Ollie has cost his parents a fortune for dental surgery and we are all desperately trying to stop him rowing and undoing all the work. He was over here on Friday for our family Xmas meal. The day started badly as the temperature just kept going up! We must have got well over 30C by lunchtime so I decided to cook the turkeys in the dairy and donga ovens. It was far too hot to light the Esse wood fired stove, but we cooked the vegetables in the house on the gas stove along with the Xmas puddings Bo had made. Bo’s puddings get better every year and I think the amount of brandy involved goes up too.

I cooked the mustard potatoes the way my friend Liz had taught me. This worked really well as they were attractive and not too greasy. I rigged up a massive steamer for the rest of the vegetables and that worked too. My adopted son and his partner and her mother brought lots of seas food for starters and Bo’s mother in law cooked an ice cream cake as well as fruit mince tarts so we had loads of food.

My youngest son, JJ , and his partner Robbie, helped me set out the tables in the hall. We had at least 25 guests expected so this year we used four tables lined end to end. I had brought several metres of cloth to roll out as a tablecloth.  Bo had decided that this years colours were to be turquoise and silver so we used silver coloured bowls for the dried fruit chocolates and Turkish delight and had silver tinsel and sparkles on the blue cloth. It all looked very festive but I was too busy to take a photo.

Luckily as evening approached the temperature dropped and it was possible to all be indoors with out cooking ourselves. My eldest son, Al , and his partner, Pip, are now in the UK with my mum so they could not be here for the feast but Pip’s parents came and her brother and his partner, so their family was represented. Al’s daughter brought her partner and Al’s son brought his girl friend. Our family gets larger every year! I wonder if one day my adopted son will be able to have some of his birth siblings at the feast.

I am at a bit of a loss to know how one relates to adopted children’s half siblings. Today on face book I find one of them seems to have lost their sister from the adopting family they grew up in.  I would like to send words of condolence but as we have never met it is hard to know what to say. I have seen the childhood photos of the two brothers and they look so like my son (even though they are have different birth fathers) that they feel like family.

There has been another sad event today. We were woken by the sound of helicopters flying overhead. They circled for hours until they found the place were an ultra light air craft had crashed yesterday killing the two passengers. They had set off yesterday from a conference centre just over the hill from us but never made their destination. The crash was in the forest with in sight of our farm but we never heard anything.

It is warm and over cast today and feels quite ominous.