Last minute preparations

Are you ready?

Have a very happy and peaceful Christmas.

Spending Christmas

The tree -

pricey Fraser fir but it smells lovely and hasn't dropped any needles.

 Advent windows - small charge for a map.

Waldorf stars - this year with the right paper,

waxed translucent coloured squares all the way from San Diego.

Sunrise.

Sunset. 

Free gifts.

Tall Cat takes refuge

from the snow.

It must be at least 3mm deep.

Rest cure

 Nothing to read here.

What a relief.

No signs.

No instructions.

No advertisements.

I find myself incapable of ignoring any lettering

however banal.
These days we are bombarded by messages,
but the habit of reading them all started young.

I remember feeling obliged to decipher the words

mesembryanthemum criniflorum

on the back of the loo door at home.

I can't have been more than five years old.

My father had pasted up some pages torn out of Amateur Gardening to

the panels on the door.

There was another sign in his spindly writing taped

to the geyser that heated the water for our baths.

It read,

Remember. Before lighting remove paper from chimney.

We read this nightly and eventually set it, somewhat bizarrely, 
to the hard-to-scan chorus of

In a feeble attempt to stave off this madness

I peel the labels from appliances

and products that cannot be mistaken for anything else.

This may yet be my undoing but so far it offers a little merciful respite.

How do you cope?