Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year too.

So I am wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year too. My husband went down with a bug just before Christmas and kindly shared it with me and we are just surfacing again. We are much better today but with poorly chests, dreadful coughs and poor breathing. The bug has upset my husband's asthma badly.

I missed Christmas! We had a grand day planned with 16 members of the extended family coming.  My elder daughter was in overall charge of the cooking this year (each household takes it in turn) and had delegated various tasks to everybody. She had booked her church hall for the rest of the day after the morning service had finished. They have a lovely kitchen with a nice, new cooker. They also have a small hall which has comfortable soft seating at one end, tables that can be put together to seat everybody together and still have just enough space left for the children to run off some surplus Christmas energy. None of us can seat 16 people for dinner in our houses and this seemed a great alternative.

 

They all took photos so that we could at least see the pictures of the happy times they had together. The second picture is the quantity of  roast vegetables and potatoes to feed 14 hungry people, all kept warm on a borrowed hostess trolley.  This picture made me smile even though I really did not want to know anything about food that day. It is such a huge amount of food but it must have been good because there were very few leftovers : )

 

Since seven of the 14 people are vegetarian, we have a tradition of lots of veg.  This year they managed to serve 22 different veg plus apples and cranberries in sauces.  I think they might have got the family record this year!

 

Wishing you a happy and healthy new year in 2016