TRISH TAKE FIVE: Game girl Trish makes a Christmas wish . . .
Award-winning blogger TRISH BURGESS writes for you . . .
I rang my mother up last week and my three-year old niece, Lucy, answered the phone.
I asked her if she’d had a lovely Christmas.
“Christmas is over now,” she announced, in a matter-of-fact way, then passed the phone over to her grandma.
My mum and I were quite tickled by this response - she’s only little, but already she’s moved on from the festivities.
There’s such a long build-up to Christmas and it’s over in a flash, leaving you with overflowing bin bags, dried-up satsumas and boxes of chocolates with only the coffee creams remaining. I suspect it’s a different chocolate in your house. Maybe you love coffee creams and have dozens of unwanted hazelnut swirls?
Our traditional family Christmas was a little different this year. Our son, Rory, is no longer a student, so he was only at home for a few days before he had to head back to work in Coventry.
He met with old friends at The Ivy Wall on Christmas Eve, creeping into the house in the early hours of Christmas Day like the Big Man himself. But he’d left us a gift - an empty styrofoam box with a white plastic fork. The remains of tomato ketchup and the pervading smell of vinegar indicated my Santa had needed the restorative power of chips to soak up the sherry.
On Christmas morning, Dougie and I were first up, looking at our watches, waiting excitedly for our son to wake up. Gone are the days when he would burst into our room at some ungodly hour asking ‘”Has Santa been?”
He no longer shakes and pokes presents under the tree. I do that now, and my own son has to stop me from opening presents before December 25. “Put it back under the tree, Mum!”
Dougie took charge of the Christmas lunch. It’s like having Gordon Ramsay in your home for the day; lots of bossing about and only a little less sweary. With me pretending to be Nigella, adding cranberries to the red cabbage and pomegranate juice to the Prosecco, it was a veritable celebrity kitchen.
Dougie likes the prep; give him a knife and he’ll chop things all day. He just needs reminding when to stop chopping and start cooking. Rory is well aware of this and one of his presents to his dad this year was a book, “50 Things to do with a Penknife”.
I’ve noticed there’s a chapter on whittling fruit and vegetables, so maybe next year we’ll have courgette peacock tails, a cucumber chain and a musical carrot flute. Heaven forbid.
The entertainment this year came in the form of ‘Obama Llama’, a very funny game which involves working out a rhyme from a description. For example, ‘a morning TV presenter creating a wobbly pudding’ is ‘Lorraine Kelly making a jelly’. Players also have to act out the rhymes. My charade of ‘Sinitta eating a fajita’ was only just eclipsed by Dougie’s Oscar-winning ‘Sting in a G-String’.
This is what Christmas memories are made of...
You can read Trish’s blog at www.mumsgoneto.co.uk
