been and gone ......

 Happy days!

Friends arriving

champagne popping

food savoured

jokes shared 

thank-you's exchanged

 forest walking

patient horses

tired dogs

happy days

my special christmas greetings to you

The holidays are here, our house is full.

The family is complete (Ghetto has come home too! YAY!)  

There's a turkey in the oven, a Christmas pudding 

ready to steam, crackers to be pulled, 

fires to be lit, games to be played, stockings 

to delve into, gifts to unwrap.   

Soft music in the background, 
champagne is poured, 

perfume dabbed behind ears,

and pretty dresses slipped on.

I won't be blogging for a couple of days; this is a time to

enjoy precious family, but I would like to thank you all.

Thank you for reading me during this year;

thank you for leaving me comments and sending me emails;

thank you for inspiring me to write;

thank you to all those who came to 
visit us here in Normandy, 

it has been a pleasure and a privilege getting to know you.

Gibson and Ghetto join me and the whole family in wishing 

you all a very joyeux noël, 

and may the new year be kind to us all.



(PS.  the dogs hope you like their very kitsch card - you can't imagine what 
it took to get this shot - I should have done a 'making of!!)

our French christmas

Christmas in France, as in many cultures,  is a time for catching up with family, or failing that reuniting with old friends.    This year our respective extended families won't be with us, but we will have friends staying and others invited for dinner and lunch.


We like to exchange gifts on Christmas Day and we also have stockings to open on Christmas morning.  These have always been my favourite bit of Christmas.  When the children were little, the stockings filled by Santa, were left in front of the fireplace on Christmas Eve and discovered at the end of their beds on Christmas morning.  Come dawn I had  little voices whispering in my ear  "Mummy, can we start opening our presents yet,  look what Father Christmas  brought me!"

 In France the Christmas Eve dinner is almost more important than lunch on Christmas Day.  For this meal we favour a series of small courses, enjoying food that we don't eat all year round.  My favourite on the menu are the home made blini that accompany smoked salmon, cream, dill and black pepper. 

Many French families go to evening Mass early on Christmas Eve then return home to share gifts before sitting down for a long dinner.  The next day they may join up with the same family members or other cousins, grandparents ... to enjoy Christmas lunch.  The most popular Christmas afternoon activity is often a long walk together - good idea after all that food!!

We more or less stick to that here, although I have somehow added an extra dinner this evening, inviting friends we won't be seeing over the holidays.

All these meals, with guests in the house, mean that I do as much preparation as possible ahead of time.  I already showed you the chestnut creams that are ready in the freezer; and my proper Christmas pudding was made weeks ago.

But I have also made mince pies, biscuits and mini sausage rolls for those iffy moments at the end of the day when nobody is really hungry for another meal but if I put out a selection of cheese, fruit, and nibbles it always seems to be appreciated with a glass of wine in front of the fire.

So I'll finish writing this blog post early in the morning, wrap a few final gifts.  Prepare some individual tiramisus for dinner this evening and probably decorate the fireplace like I did last year.

An enjoyable day, the children around catching up with their friends, listening to music,
an air of quiet excitement.  Hope you're having fun too.

Tomorrow I have some special Christmas greetings for you, then I'll sign off for a few days.

a christmas mood board - for the men in our lives

So I have been asking around the men in my life - not that there are that many of them!  What colours would they like to see at Christmas?

I actually started using words like 'mood board' and 'vignette' but they just glazed over so we slipped back to familiar terms like 'colour, texture, objects' and it all just came together.  (sorry boys, that was a joke!)

I stuck to dark burgundy, black and silver.  A bouquet of black berried ivy, some brown feather baubles from the tree, antique cutlery and candles (what's new?! ).  An antique map of New York and dominoes for an air of boyish pleasure, a bottle of wine, a little mercury glass and that was it.

This is my last mood board before Christmas, thank you all for your kind comments about them, I so hope you've enjoyed them and maybe taken some ideas for decorating this year.

Only a couple more days to go and I have a little more shopping and wrapping and baking to do, but I'll be back again tomorrow.   Have fun!

when a tree is not a tree

Do you remember when artificial christmas trees used to be tacky?   Not so now ...  I just love this simple tree, get it out of the box, unfold and bend as required, add a few pretty decorations and it's done.

A simple, country feel that goes so well in this elegant and comfortable decor, home to an interior designer in the UK.  They have this small white tree in the family room and a larger real tree in the sitting room.

Don't you think the unfussy white lines make things feel peaceful and calm?  -  what most of us are longing for now with only a few days to go before the holidays!

Hope your preparations are on schedule, and your home filled with the smell of baking, the sound of music and laughter.

home made centre piece for your christmas table

If there's a moment in the year when you can be a little more daring with your flowers on the table it has to be the holidays.

This is the moment when I like to use flowers plus .... other things.  A lot of you have told me that you are decorating with white, silver and fresh green this year, so I tried to put together an idea that may fit in, using materials that most of us have in the home already  or that are inexpensive to buy.

 To make these centrepieces, I used two urns I already had, some florists foam (either already ball shape or cut into a ball from a new brick);  wooden barbecue skewers;  a bunch of cuttings from a box hedge; a bunch of small white roses, some small Christmas baubles and a bag of  ... brussel sprouts!

Start by soaking the balls of foam in water, the wetter they are the longer your arrangement will last.  Actually you can increase the lifespan by putting these out into a cool garage each night.  Stand a straight branch in each recipient or urn, and make sure they are firm using stones, foam, even plaster if you wish.

Push each ball down onto the stick to create the hole, then take them off again to start building up the arrangement.

After you have put small lengths of box all over the ball, prepare the brussel sprouts.  I use these because I love their colour, their small tidy shape and because they last for a long time, even if the roses need changing.    Peel off any discoloured leaves, then push a short length of skewer into the base of each, position on the ball of foam.

Start building up the ball, using the sprouts, roses and baubles, with some more box if required, until the foam is completely covered and you have a nice round shape.   Push the ball back onto the 'trunk' and check the shape, then cover the base with some beautiful green moss.  Voila!


The same idea works just as well with red roses and tiny apples or lichi.  Pine cones are good too, but can be more difficult to fix to the foam.

While I was already making a mess I also popped a few white hellebore with some baby ivy into an old soup tureen and surrounded it with moss.  Doesn't look spectacular for the moment but it will grow during the holidays.

Hope you enjoyed that, I'll be back tomorrow with something else!

a bright and happy pink christmas

If there's one thing our whole world needs at the moment it's some bright,

wake-you-up cheerfulness.

The weekend has shot by, but I thought I'd just tuck these pictures in to keep us going 

and remind us all that having fun and keeping things light is vital!

May Christmas bring out the pink and happy in each and every one of us!!

all pictures thanks to Art & decoration

a mood board for christmas - the warmth of red

I had said I wouldn't be doing anything red for Christmas, longing for calm, for sleek looking tones of silver and white.  But yesterday, red got the better of me and I threw together this mood board.   Trying to avoid anything garish I went for tones of red that border on pink, burgundy or even brown.

I used bronze candle holders, tree decorations, old Christmas stockings made from antique tapestry, and two hand painted beautiful silk fans that I found recently and will be listing soon.

What do you think?  Too toned down, or warm and comforting?

Do you plan out your Christmas table, or does it just happen?

I'd love to know what colours you'll be using this year

Another find this week are these little gold edged coupelles for catching the candle wax - love them!

I'm counting on you to tell me when you've had enough of my mood boards!

I'm having fun, so if you don't stop me I'll just keep going until I hear those reindeer bells!

Hope you're having agood weekend

thank you for reading me!