Christmas Mid-month Musings 2023

Christmas Crafting

My sister and I attended a workshop on making Christmas mosaics at The Art House in Sheffield, last Friday. We both chose to make stars, and it was a very relaxing couple of hours. If you live in the area, I’d recommend The Art House, which runs a variety of art and craft classes including pottery-making courses.

Mosaic-making doesn’t require much skill, if I'm honest, though cutting the bits of ceramic and glass takes a certain knack.  The teacher, Diana, had put a display of what we assumed to be her own work round the room and those pieces showed exceptional talent and imagination. So, clearly, if you have a creative mind, you can produce wonderful pieces. But we were just there to learn the basic techniques. 

My sister chose mostly bits of ceramic with patterns on them, for her star, which I thought looked fabulous – however, her glue hadn’t set fully by the time we left, so she had to take some grout home with her to complete her piece at home [and she still hasn’t had chance to complete it – hence no pictures]. 

I chose bits of coloured glass and produced the star below [I painted the gold round the edge at home after the class]:

     

The process is not without its dangers, as bits of glass tend to fly off in different directions as you cut the pieces. Diana herself cut her finger quite badly while helping my sister cut up a china cup. It is also, like all crafts, rather dirty and messy - I have sore fingers due to eczema and I tend to be reluctant to do crafts these days as a result, but it certainly wasn't the worst thing I'd done. My fingers were sore afterwards, however, both in terms of the skin and in terms of joint pain and a bit of swelling in my right index finger. But the joint pain subsided after 24 hours.

I'm not thrilled by my star but at least I know now how to do a mosaic, so if I ever fancy doing something more interesting using the technique, I'll know how to do it.

Due to roadworks in Sheffield city centre, the area round The Art House [bottom of Carver Street and Backhouse Lane] is cordoned off at the moment, so you have to enter The Art House from the entrance beside the main church entrance, rather than the one on Backhouse Lane as directed by The Art House's emails. 

https://www.arthousesheffield.co.uk/

Christmas Tree Decorating

Anyone who knows me will know that I am not a massive fan of Christmas, and I think that decorating the tree before about a week prior to 25 December is 'a bad thing'. However, when you have a nine-year-old great-nephew who always decorates the tree for you, but who is only available on certain days [his life being such a social whirl!], you have to be flexible.

Hence, Nephew came round last Thursday to decorate our Christmas tree. We have a tree that has no green leaves - it is just bare branches. We've had different sorts of trees in the past, including real ones now and again, but we found the trees seemed to be so bushy that it was difficult to get the baubles to hang properly and to be seen, and personally I like the baubles better than the tree. In my view, trees should be outdoors and unadorned!  So, we have an artificial tree with bare branches, which lights up. We can put lots of ornaments on it, and it suits us. Below are a few pics of Great-Nephew at work...

             

Nephew about to put the star on top of the tree

Nephew did a great job and he finished it too - in his younger years, he usually lost interest halfway through!  He does have a slightly OCD-ish quality, however, and many of the ornaments of a similar nature are arranged along single branches, such as the small white stars (on which we write the names of friends and relatives who have died and put them on the tree to remember them - it's become one of our little Christmas traditions, and it allows us an opportunity to tell nephew who those people were, as he asks every year]. This means that my own OCD-ish tendencies kick in after he's gone and I am constantly fighting the urge to rearrange the tree ornaments, but I've fought it down so far! Last year, I rearranged the baubles so that all the colours were together in different parts of the tree, which is a similar impulse to nephew's desire to have all the cars or all the stars on the same branch.

My friend T has young adult daughters who decorate the tree at her house and she says they no longer let her display the old ornaments she used to put on the tree when her daughters were little, as they have modern ideas about 'stylish' trees. So I bought a toy soldier ornament to display at the front of our tree on T's behalf. We also have several polystyrene aeroplanes decorating our tree, a tradition that began several years ago when one accidentally 'flew' into the tree and got stuck in the branches!

    

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Christmas Choir

My friend B and I recently attended the Barnsley Light-Up Event, when the town's Christmas lights were officially switched on, in order to sing in a Rock Choir Christmas performance. 

We both enjoyed the event very much, but we found preparing for it quite arduous. The Rock Choir has weekly sessions during term-time in which we work on new songs and go through older ones we've done before, but the performances often involve several different branches of the choir. The one in Barnsley, for instance, consisted mostly of the Barnsley group, but there were about five of us from the Rotherham group and a bunch of others from the Sheffield group. They don't have rehearsals for all the performers together - we're just given a playlist and we can prepare ourselves by watching and singing along to the various online recap sessions available on the website. The idea is that all the hundreds of Rock Choir groups round the country do the same repertoire of songs, so they can all sing them together where necessary without requiring extra rehearsals. However, the Christmas songs are a little different in that there re a number of Christmas songs but group leaders don't have to do them all. They just select which to do.

Our group leader, the eccentric and enthusiastic Tom, has covered 'I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day' in our sessions, but B, T and myself are still relatively new to the choir so we haven't worked on the other Christmas songs yet. There were at least three songs on the concert playlist that were new to us, including one adaptation of 'Walking In A Winter Wonderland' that had words and a tune we'd never heard before! So B and I spent hours listening to and watching recap tutorials and videos, and practising - trying to learn both the words and the simple dance moves, plus our particular version of the tune [we're lower altos]. It was very much like studying for an exam and it was quite exhausting!

rock choir in Barnsley 'Putting-On-Christmas-Lights' Event - 

B and I are at the back so you can't see us

The worst moment for us was when the Barnsley group leader, who was conducting us, announced that the next song was 'Keeping The Dream Alive', a song that had been missed off the playlist altogether (presumably by accident) and which the Rotherham group hadn't covered while we have been members!  We had to just move our mouths randomly and try to sing the bits we knew! We were standing at the back, so no one could see us, so I think we got away with it!

It was the night we have our great-nephew, so P took him to see the choir. When he picked him up from school, he was wearing short trousers and a thin jacket, so P had to take him home to change into warmer clothing as it was a very cold evening. I'm certain Great-Nephew was bored out of his skull, as well as being freezing, but we bought him some toy cars in a toy shop on way back to car-park afterwards and that seemed to pacify him!

Great-Nephew has alsio been helping his grandma put up her decorations, including outdoor ones, and he had the same clothing issue so was forced to wear his grandma's hat and gloves:

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Christmas Choir 2

Meanwhile, down in Devon, my friends A and S, have been singing and performing at The Fairground Vintage Christmas Event in Lifton, in Victorian costume , and will appear in their Youth Theatre's upcoming production of A Christmas Carol (Red Spider Theatre Company):

S is in the middle

 

A, dressed as a Victorian chimney-sweep who can, for some reason, play the fiddle

Some of the ladies in the choir in costume

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Christmas Baking

I did my first lot of Christmas baking last week, and P helped me. What was remarkable about this is that we didn't squabble and I didn't lose my temper - we actually enjoyed it, for once! I made a chocolate marble cake which I drizzled with orange syrup to create a sort of chocolate-orange cake, and a fabulous carrot cake with maple cream cheese frosting. I also made some malformed but tasty oat cookies, almond and pistachio macaroons, and my traditional overcooked gingerbread! These were divvied out to The Master, who came round for roast beef yesterday, and for my friends B and T. 

Here are a few images:

carrot cake

oat cookies

gingerbread

Mum has bought us a huge iced Christmas cake, which is a bit of a problem as I'm on a diet and I don't really like Christmas cake all that much. Also, my friend B often makes us a Christmas cake so there is a possibility that this will happen this year too, in which case we'll be knee-deep in fruitcake. The cake Mum has bought us is an M & S one and it smells lovely. We gave half of it to The Master yesterday so he can take it to his cousin's in Norfolk, where he is spending Christmas, and pretend he made it himself... 

        On that topic, might I just add that our cat, Tilly, appears to have fallen in love with The Master. He slept in our top room, where Tilly has recently been sleeping, so we tried to shut her out of it during his stay. However, we forgot the cat is a master locksmith and, apparently, within seconds of him settling down in bed she was sitting on his chest, staring into his eyes. She then settled down beside him and slept there all night! She had a definite spring in her step this morning - one night sharing a bed with The Master seems to have transformed her from an arthritic fifteen-year-old to a kitten! That's what love will do. 

        I have eaten very little of the stuff I baked myself due to diet. However, I have kept the least successful biscuits for our own consumption [all the very badly deformed or slightly burnt ones!], and I am now tempted to nibble them whenever I smell them in the kitchen. Christmas isn't an easy time to diet. Not that there is any rhyme or reason in the way my Slimming World diet is going. I lost another half a pound last Thursday, despite having broken the diet numerous times in the previous week due to Christmas get-togethers. I've now lost one and a half stone since I started in July, around a pound a week on average, though with several big blips up and down.

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Christmas Update On Gromit

You'll be pleased to know that Gromit has settled into his new home in Kent and is readying himself for Christmas. Here are the latest pics I've been sent by his new mum:

The boys waiting for Father Christmas

Keeping warm on these cold winter evenings

Worrying that Santa won't know where he lives now

Practising his reading

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So, Christmas has now officially begun in our household. Presents are wrapped and some are under the tree. Baking has been undertaken. Cards have been made and sent. Just got to sit back and let it slide past me now...

Great-Nephew pulling a daft face and wearing Christmas deely-boppers

2023 Christmas Card design, painted by Louise Wilford

Merry Christmas, Everyone!