Our Christmas Traditions

A Glimpse of Christmas With Us…

Christmas is a very family orientated time of year for us.

We wait until 1st December for the tree to go up and everyone likes to get involved. As you can imagine the children are quite enthusiastic so the tree often gets decorated twice, Will and I sneak back in and decorate it again one evening. The fussiest member of the family on tree decorating is actually — Will. He is very particular and takes a lot of care in the process. We tend to have a really big tree in the main house and then in our wing we have a small tree and the children have little mini ones in their bedrooms. The ones in their bedrooms have their own decorations so that keeps them pretty happy. The beautiful stairwell in the main house also gets garlands up the banisters and the whole place looks pretty magical.

The next quite unusual tradition we have is Christmas Eve. My mother-in-law, Jackie, is half Icelandic so Will has always grown-up celebrating Christmas Eve. This involves having a big black-tie dinner, which is always great fun and a good excuse to get dressed up. The most obscure thing about the evening though is the fact that we have rice pudding as a starter and in it we pour Ribena! It is actually delicious, but it definitely took a few years to get my head around. It also then becomes a game, because in two bowls there will be half an almond and a whole almond. The trick is to get through the course without anyone noticing that you’ve got one of almonds. Once everyone has finished you guess who has them and then the two of them get a presents. It gets pretty competitive and naturally tensions get high as to who has the almonds. What Christmas doesn’t have a bit of drama!

Generally, some of us either go to church after this dinner for midnight mass or on Christmas day morning.  

Christmas Day itself starts pretty early, whenever the children wake up, and it’s stockings in bed. The usual bits need to happen like taking dogs out and showering etc, and they somehow fit into the morning as children run around demanding more presents. We manage to put them off until about 11am/12 noon and at this point we have a glass of Champagne and open presents, which is carnage. Trying to get them to open them slowly is a task and half so that we can write down who has given what to them for thank you letters. They have a quick bite to each and then our youngest goes down for her nap, while our eldest has some quiet time. 

We all then have a light lunch as we pace ourselves until about 4pm for our main meal. In the past, we’ve watched The Queen’s speech and others go for a walk.  

Christmas lunch is big as we all pile our plates high with our eyes bigger than our stomachs. We do crackers, tell a few awful jokes, put on the hats and dig in! We have Christmas pudding afterwards with brandy poured on top so that it comes in flaming. Brandy Butter is a firm favourite, along with a bit of port, and then we all pass out really!

We might venture for another walk, but the rest of the day is spent watching TV and if anyone can stomach any more food that day then its cheese in front of the TV later on.

However you celebrate yours, we hope you have a wonderful time!