This morning I got round to hanging up the Christmas cards. It's always a puzzle where to put them. The first to arrive go on the mantelpiece, but then I run out of space, not that we are so wildly popular, but the mantelpiece isn't that large, and they have to be moved anyway on Christmas Eve when the greenery comes in. Some years I've pinned them to the pelmet above the monster window, but that's really too high up to see them properly, and it's quite hard work thrusting pins through the cardboard plus the furnishing fabric and lining. We've tried standing them at the end of the dining table, since it's a generous six seater and there will only be two of us for Christmas lunch, but we need the table this year for a family do on Sunday, and in any case the cats always knock them over. It's like playing at falling dominoes, how many cards can you topple with one swipe of a paw.
This year, for the second year running, they are hung over ribbons running between the wall light fittings, and taped to more ribbons hanging from the light fittings and down the banisters. This time it's actually raffia, because I couldn't find any spools of ribbon in Waitrose or Tesco, and I had some red and pink raffia already. A couple have dropped open rather annoyingly, so I'll need to go round with a few dabs of cellotape (or sticky tape, as they always called it on Blue Peter to avoid mentioning any brand names and giving them free advertising on the BBC). I suppose the loving greetings inside, hand written by our friends and relations, should mean more to us than the pictures, but I quite like looking at the pretty side.
There is a small overflow section on top of the stereo speakers, which the cats will doubtless knock over more than once during the holidays. If the last couple of deliveries before Christmas bring any more I'm not quite sure where they'll go. If they were cards that hinge at the top then I could drape them over some picture frames, but those seem out of fashion at the moment. Mind you, they can be a nuisance if you are trying to stand cards up, and you get one that is too weak to support itself and keeps opening out entirely, toppling its neighbours before and behind it.
We've had two for our neighbour who sold us the house, over twenty years ago. The one that's only addressed to him I'll drop round. The one addressed jointly to him and his wife, who died over a year ago, has gone tactfully in the bin. One of our nieces sent us one, when we haven't sent her one (sorry Katie), but that's because she hasn't told us her current address, so she's had to make do with the joint greetings dispatched to the parental home. News content has been a bit thin this year. Friends in the north who always send a round robin did so this year, but they write very nice round robins, good factual stuff about what the family's been up to, with no gratuitous bragging. A gardening friend from my Writtle days disclosed that she was now a grandmother, and that she had given up her job. Both of these things were on the cards, given that her daughter was expecting, and that she worked for an unpleasant bunch of clowns. I emailed congratulations, and we'll catch up properly in the New Year.
This evening the phone rang, and it was our neighbour who sold us the house. Not with an invitation to Boxing Day drinks this time, alas, but with the news that another neighbour had died. Poor chap, he received cancer treatment a while back, but had been looking very frail in recent months, so one had a sense the thing hadn't gone away. I feel very much for his family. To lose anyone at any time is hard, and to have it fall just before Christmas, when you are deluged with expectations of joy and jollity, and will be every year for the anniversary, must be extra difficult.
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