Getting ready

I've spent the last few weeks responding to every hint of Christmas - decorations in shops, carol singing kids at the breakfast table, request from Adam for fruit mince pies (he ended up cooking his own) - by growling "it's not December yet!" in true bah humbug fashion. But come Monday it will be December and that means there's a whole bunch of Stuff To Do this weekend.

As I mentioned, we've done barely any Christmas shopping, so tonight is list writing time and the plan is to be up and out bright and early tomorrow morning for a bit of a marathon effort at the shops. I'm going to do as much as I can on-line and there are some people I can shop for at work but not every member of my extended family fits into the sci-fi geek category (more's the pity). I'm also hoping to do some major tidying up around the house and shifting of furniture so we can move our old entertainment unit out of the lounge room and take it downstairs. This will reclaim the huge chunk of space it's uselessly taking up given that the new TV doesn't fit in it (instead the TV is sitting on the coffee table, we're waiting on new TV and storage units which are being custom made). Saturday night we have a Christmas party to go to which will be nice, we won't stay too late though, I don't want us or the kids too tired for Sunday.

Sunday is decorating day. We'll be putting up the tree, festooning the lounge room with figurines and musical stuffed toys, wondering where the heck that Advent calendar is (I'd forgotten it was missing till I went back and read that post. Damn.), wrestling with mysteriously tangled strings of outdoor lights (doesn't matter how carefully you put them away the year before, tangled they will be) and putting Santa hats on the Dalek and R2-D2 robots.

David suggested this afternoon that we find all the Christmas books and put them in a special box to read in the lead up to Christmas, I was already intending to do just that so it was nice to know it'll be worth doing. Not sure when I'll tackle that one though. Sometime before Monday night I guess.

Sunday afternoon we'll be going to see Carnival of the Animals and possibly going out for pizza and gelato afterwards.

Then I will die of exhaustion.

But it will be a happy death, I will be able to turn on all my pretty lights, light the vanilla, cranberry and spice scented candles, put some music on and bask in the indulgent, silly, over the top Christmassy wonderfulness of it all.

Because I'm not really a bah humbug person at all, I love every bit of it.