Picture © Paramount
We said goodbye to the festive season last night, time was I would have insisted on waiting until the 6th but to be honest I have come to see the merit in leaving Christmas behind in favour of the year ahead. With yesterday being a Bank Holiday it made sense to get it over and done with before the world returned to normal today. I played no part in the Christmas decorating process but was only too happy to help taking them down, which we managed to do in good time. This Christmas we didn't decorate as fully as usual, yet still had the living room, dining room, kitchen and bedroom kitted out and I brought the boxes down from my office and put the full ones back, rendering one corner of my office as a festive corner all year round.
Before the box of DVDs and videos went back upstairs, we dug out one final film to watch while attempting to finish the remaining Christmas food in the house. Maybe I was a little greedy with it but I always see party food and buffets as a challenge. I remember as a teenager there was a pizza restaurant that was the first 'all you can eat' places in the town and had not thought any aspect of it through. They had no small print whatsoever so we were able, for £10, to eat pizza, pasta, ice-cream, beer, wine, dough balls and anything else edible until the closed sign went up. The next day the poster was out of the window, the day after there was a new poster with slightly more thought out wording that basically limited your options to just the main course stuff because pizza and pasta is quite filling to a lot of people. I have always been able to put away a lot of food without the consequence of putting on weight, although now that I am forty I notice that I am not going to get away with this for much longer. Mandi sees right through my protests that my clothes are shrinking so I intend to get more swimming in this year. Swimming is the only exercise I can cope with and is probably the most effective, apart from the problem of swimming making me hungry and the child-like joy I have when I leave the changing room and make my way to the machines for my can of Coke and a bag of crisps.
With a bigger than necessary plate of cheese, pickled onions, tortilla chips, dip, pork pie, crackers, pate, we sat down to watch White Christmas. Neither of us wanted to watch anything too Christmassy so we opted for this because it only sort of touches on Christmas even though it begins and ends on Christmas Eve. Next year we will have to have a look through the films and only watch the ones we haven't watched this year. It's partly my fault because I have only wanted to watch different versions of A Christmas Carol. In 2017 I have a few projects lined up involving A Christmas Carol so I might be a bit fed up of it and won't bother with the films.
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