24 divided by 2 minus 2

Happy 2016 my dear friends! Somehow in the last month a huge weight has come upon me and I have not just had the energy or inclination to write anything for the blog. I suspect it is the rain. We often joke about the fact that it is always raining in Wales, but for the last few months it really has been. Normally, there are spates of small showers interspersed with some drizzle and outbreaks of sunshine. That's normal. But lately the weather has just been haywire everywhere. Flooding in the north and seemingly nonstop torrential downpours here. I can't imagine why (but am grateful) we haven't flooded here. The river Tywi is bursting it's banks. Who wants to get up and do *anything* when it is cold and grey and pissing down with rain outside when you could laze about in your jim-jams and read on the sofa? Not me, babe.

But here i am in 2016 and I want to express my gratitude for all the good that I have managed to get up and do.

last year's Christmas meal

We had a spectacular, cozy and vegan friendly Christmas. Sadly, I did not take many pictures. With all the rain the natural light was non-existent coming through the windows and every picture i did take was dark, shadowy and unseeable. Is unseeable even a word?  It is now.

We are needing to watch our money carefully so had decided to forgo gifts and just enjoy each others company. We were blessed with gifts from lovely kind hearted friends who send us some pressies through the post. Thanks to The Anders family for the Bananagram game (which has scrabble-like tiles so we have played word games in both Welsh and English. Da iawn! Go us!) and thanks to Lena and family who sent us this beautiful calendar with gorgeous woodcut illustrations of our old town of Hitchin! What a treat! And our friend Loren who sent me this box of all sorts of vegan goodies to pamper myself with like body oil with real lavender flowers in it as well as some bath salts. Yum! At least I will smell nice in 2016.

Spiderman surprised me with fruits and nuts and candy which we munched on over the holiday. Christmas at my Sweetie's house (my grandmother was called Sweetie) always involved being herded into a back bedroom and then a few minutes later my Sweetie would rush in exclaiming, "Santy has came!" and we would rush out for presents and our stockings were always filled with fruits and nuts and candy. Some sort of citrus, pecans from her tree and those crispy peanut butter logs. Spiderman brought us oranges, pistachio nuts, dried mango and Turkish Delight. Which made me think of our friend Lena and her family as we always had it with them at Christmas.

We also treated ourselves to this adorable book which translates as Walter's Wonderful Web. More on this adorable book later.

Over the holiday we began to realise that we were 24 divided by 12 minus 2. What does that even mean? Well I will tell you.

We have celebrated Christmas 24 times as a married couple.
We have celebrated Christmas 12 times in the UK.
2 of those have now been in Wales.
24 divided by 12 minus 2.

That's pretty exciting. Stay tuned for tomorrow's tale of the annual anti fox hunting demo on New Year's day that got a bit out of hand.

Happy new year to you all!