December's Slow Fade

Soft as falling snow December becomes Christmas.  We have started receiving Christmas cards and sent all ours yesterday and today.  This morning I baked the three Christmas cakes and we have already rejuvenated some vintage home-made mincemeat (with Cointreau) and made a fresh batch.    And the Christmas cacti that we inherited with our last house have flowered; spectacular pink flowers like fuchsia heads, sitting on the kitchen windowsill.  I thought they were Easter cacti and have argued this corner for some time; but flowering in Advent more or less decides it. There are some general applications to be done but the working year is over in terms of real paid work; our work as writer and artist never finishes, we are never not working.

The house is slowly filling with the smell of baking fruit cakes.  In a while we are going foraging and hope to find a large branch to hang Christmas cards from and a bag or two of beech branches as firewood.  Exercising our ancient common-law right to glean the woods for firewood.