A Charles Dickens Christmas

This was our first Christmas in Wales or Nadolig am Cymru, if you prefer. It was a bit of a Charles Dickens Christmas and by that I don’t mean we were visited by three ghosts and we changed our miserly ways after being shown the past, the present and the future.

No, I’m thinking more of A Tales of Two Cities, you know:

 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

 

Yeah.

 The good:

We had a wonderful three days of celebrating from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day where we ate ourselves silly with all this amazing, delicious healthy cruelty free food. I have a new favourite vegetable--the parsnip. I love it so much I have composed a song in its honour. Seriously. More on that later.

 

The bad:

Our Lily Rose was found dead on Christmas Eve. She was our oldest spider--somewhere in the range of fourteen years old or so--and she was our first spider in the UK.  She was also our first second hand spider that we got from a lovely lady named Sue who could no longer care for her. Our first rescue. It just broke out hearts.

 

The happy:

Despite having to watch our pennies, we each had a pressie under the tree as well as a joint gift. Siôn Corn (Father Christmas, literally Chimney John) did not forget his little chickadees! Spiderman got a new key chain with a Welsh dragon as his old one had broken and I got a Welsh children’s songbook of traditional Welsh tunes that came with a CD, a book of chords so you can play along at home and (thankfully) a translation. I can now play three songs!!!! Go me! I’d also like to thank Tallulah who actually makes the music. I am only as good as my ukulele and she’s fabulous. Together we got the new CD by our favourite comedy blues band Jonny and the Baptists entitled the Satiric Verses from their Stop UKIP tour.

 

The sad:

We had to bury Lily Rose on Christmas day as she was beginning to stink. Sorry old girl. Thankfully, it had been raining (when does it ever bloody stop here????) so the ground was quite soft which was good as we don’t own any sort of digging apparatus.  My heart was very heavy. I am writing a full eulogy for her, but am finding it emotionally hard.

 

Despite the sadness of the loss of Lily Rose, we have had pockets of sunshine where we rushed out for errands, but mostly we just had lots of Duvet Days where we snuggled up on the sofa and watched DVDs or read books. 

 

Life is just like that--the good with the bad. The happy with the sad. So I guess our first Christmas in Cymru just wasn’t that bad after all. Together we can bear all things.