I have made a start on my Christmas shopping. I feel quite good about this, as there are still over four weeks to go, though when I looked again at the supplier's website for one of my ideas for the Systems Administrator I found I'd missed their deadline by three weeks and should have ordered what I wanted by the end of November. Ah well, there's always next birthday. It doesn't do to use up all your ideas at once.
The first purchase was a table cloth. We used to have two table cloths, a red fake damask number from John Lewis and a mid 1980s Laura Ashley lace number, that had both suffered from numerous candle drips, dropped matches and a small fire in a table decoration, until they became so frankly disgusting I threw them out along with the sweaters that got eaten by moths. I sulked at the price of replacement fake red damask, before settling on a pure cotton red and green plaid from Marks and Spencer, that was practically half the cost, and coincidentally the same as the value of an unspent M&S voucher that I'd had since the Christmas before last without spending, because I can never find any clothes that I like in Marks. I tried offering it to the SA, but the SA's ideal shopping trip is a speedy in and out, with no messing around finding out how vouchers work. I was pleased to have finally used it before it expired. And pleased to have remembered before Christmas Eve that I needed to buy a tablecloth.
The next parcel to arrive was the pudding (you can see our priorities here). For years I have always bought our pudding from the Barn Owl Trust, who get them from a small firm in the Lake District that markets its puddings via charities. I had the same pudding one year in aid of a donkey sanctuary, when I lost the barn owl order form, but I prefer to get it from the owls. It is a very good pudding. Every year the media is filled with ideas for making your Christmas lunch different and special, which I always think are completely misguided, since the point of Christmas lunch is for it to be exactly the same. There are those who say that Christmas pudding is too heavy, or too rich, but they are mistaken. Christmas pudding is delicious, and anyway it's what you eat at Christmas. Not ginger and kumquat sherbet, or filo pastry with pears and pomegranate seeds, or raspberry tipsy cake with a lemon coulis, or goji berry meringue with chocolate sauce. No, Christmas lunch means traditional pudding, dried fruit, apple and suet boiled into submission.
The Barn Owl Trust is based down in Devon. I've been a supporter since meeting somebody holding a collection tin outside the Exeter branch of Sainsbury, and it's a long time since my parents moved from Devon. It always seems from its newsletters, which are frugally produced and not too frequent, to be a shiningly good charity. They put up owl boxes, monitor the barn owl population, treat injured owls, deal with chicks that have fallen out of their nests, visit local schools to promote the cause of owls, try to persuade planners and developers to make provision for them, and carry out research into owl habits and mortality. Fast moving traffic is bad news for barn owls, as is the loss of old stables and similar in which they can nest, and cold, wet winters and springs that stop them hunting. They are quite lean birds under the feathers, and not especially waterproof. The Barn Owl Trust always has a steady stream of overseas students studying conservation, and volunteers, and I get the sense from their newsletters that they provide a sanctuary for some of the humans, as well as the owls. If I lived closer I'd be an active supporter, but as it is I pay my sub and buy a pudding.
Two slim packages arrived in this morning's post with the pudding, containing the first of my Christmas presents. One, an exceptionally obscure offering for the SA, was from a strange little website I reached via a link from another apparently hand-crafted out of tofu. After reactivating my PayPal account, I had to fortify my courage by remembering PayPal's promise to reimburse my account if my thing didn't turn up before pressing the Confirm key. Then I fretted that I hadn't had a confirmation email, before the parcel arrived ahead of the one from the ritzy site with a link to Amazon that I ordered at the same time.
I know that Amazon is the great Satan, but it is great for buying presents, because you can look up and see what you've bought before. I quite often get my mother crime fiction, since she enjoys it and it's a challenge to find new authors and detective heroes, then to work out which of Death by Moonlight, Death in the Afternoon, An Unfortunate Case of Death, and Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Lead Piping is the first in the series. But it's very convenient to be able to check whether I have already mined each fictional sleuthing seam. For specialist subjects, like military history, gardening or food, you can get a long way by looking at the publishers' own websites. They increasingly sell direct, so you don't have to deal with the great Satan if you don't want to.
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