Christmas Day

Nice beef!

Christmas day dawned a nice day.  Tom had been in our room once during the night (around 2am to tell us Santa had been).  He was able to wait until 8.30 to bring his stocking in.  He got a Pumbaa from Santa and various bits and pieces in his stocking which kept him busy for the morning.

Then a posh breakfast of scrambled egg and smoked salmon for us (note: Craig doesn't do fish).  Then I prepared dinner whilst the others got ready.  As usual we had a 3 rib of beef.  So it was that, roasties, parsnips, carrots, kale, yorkies and the most amazing gravy that Craig had made for us the proper way.  I could have drunk it with a straw it was so gorgeous.   I also made Christmassy red cabbage, but as it was in the garage, I completely forgot about it so it went uneaten.

The beef:
220 DEGREES FOR 25 MINS
140 DEGREES FOR 1.5 HRS
TAKE OUT OF OVEN 45 MINS BEFORE EATING

Cheers!

It was absolutely perfect so keep to this for next year.

Pat and Bob came round about 10.30, I finished up the preparations and then we headed into the lounge to open the huge number of presents waiting for us - I'm sure the pile grows every year: although this year we had 7 people opening presents, rather than the 5 of last year.  Anyway, I think it took a good 1.5 hours for us to open everything up, all helped by Bob's rather lovely red wine - think we got through all 4 bottles by the end of lunch.

Tom Lennon!

This year seems to be a musical year for Tom as we got him a guitar (he's been asking for one for ages) and Pat and Bob got him a keyboard.  Now I know they were getting him one and was expecting a small table top one, instead it was a huge one with its own stand.  Wow! Fantastic!  I do love a surprise.  Tom was overjoyed and took to it immediately - that was it for pretty much the whole day.

Happy boy!

Good thing: it came with headphones.  I need to find all my sheet music now and see if I can interest Tom in learning to read music.  I also need to find a couple of hours to sit down with it to work out all its functions: you can record on it, it tells you which note you are playing on a display and there are a couple of buttons which suggest that it can teach you to play, but I can't work it out just by pressing them.  We had dinner at 2.30 which went down well.  We then left Tom behind with Pat and Bob whilst we headed out for a quick walk around the village to try to aid digestion of the meal.

Flippers!

I think Pat and Bob left quite soon after we got back.  The rest of the day was spent lolling on the sofa - we were all feeling very very fat, none of us could eat any more, so we sat and watched the telly for the rest of the day.

Anyway, thank you everyone, it was a lovely day and we all got some great pressies.