Yeah, bugger the turkey. Let's go to KFC.

Merry Christmas!

Lakota 

xxx

Ta-dah! Tuesday - Last one before Christmas!

Hello, and welcome to another Ta-dah! Tuesday. Sorry I've been a little sketchy with this recently, you'd think being deprived of my online life would have me making more things wouldn't you? Oddly, even though it's my own link-up, I do sometimes start to feel like it's double maths next and I haven't done my homework if I've got nothing interesting to share!

Anyway, this will be the last one before the 2013 - given that next Tuesday is Christmas, and we'll all be in some kind of food coma/drunken stupor - so please please get linking up, old posts are fine as I've missed quite a bit, and I'd particularly like to see anything festive you've been creating. [Hmm, the Tuesday after is  New Year's Day, so perhaps we should reconvene on January 8th].

I've finally made my wreath for outside the house - it would have been on the door but it weighs several pounds and I couldn't figure out how to attach it short of hanging it from the knocker. Also it seemed a little unfair on the postman to have to navigate past all the unruly prickly bits in order to bang on the door. Last year I had one made of willow and fake berries - very pretty but with an unfortunate side effect they didn't mention on the sweetie darling yummy mummy over-priced website I was silly enough to have bought it from. It stank. Seriously, imagine a tramp's boots donated to that charity shop. The one you avoid because it reeks. I have no idea why it smelled so bad, but it got embarrassing to open the door, get a whiff and notice people wondering why my porch smelled like the rhino area at Longleat safari park. It had to go.

Instead I've spent the morning wandering shiftily around our local cemetery with secateurs in hand, trying to find interesting greenery. So, here's my attempt - it's in a soaked oasis wreath base so hopefully it will survive at least a week. Despite what a friend on Facebook suggested, I did not remove the finished result from anyone's grave. Honest.

Ok, there may still be a few stinky berries on it.

The bloody birds have eaten all the real ones. Pure selfishness.

Rustic

{that outside light has never worked. I don't even know where the switch is}

It was harder than you'd imagine to find holly, but I finally found a small bush right over to the far side of the cemetery  near a section of tiny children's graves which are overgrown and clearly no longer visited. All  aside from one - decorated with tinsel and flowers - belonging to a little boy who died aged two back in the 1940s. It was bitter-sweet to imagine a by now presumably very elderly parent or sibling still coming and making it pretty for Christmas, amongst all those that have been long neglected. While I was roaming around, I also discovered this grave:

Intriguing huh? Turns out that Winchester Cathedral suffered badly with subsidence in the early 1900's - cracks big enough for an owl to roost in, apparently - and the under-pinning was being hampered by the fact that the workmen's trenches filled with water faster than they could dig. So solo deep sea diver William Walker was brought in, and spent the next six years 20 feet underwater for six hours a day, in complete darkness, evacuating the flooded trenches and filling them with bags of concrete. Given that the Cathedral is still standing, he really can be said to have saved it with his own hands. He died of the Spanish flu after the First World War. [I have no idea how he ended up in South Norwood].

After all my adventures with greenery I hauled some more ivy in from the garden and have been pretending I have ye olde ancestral hall by draping it across mirrors and mantelpieces in the style I imagine Henry VIII might have liked.

How have you decorated? Kitsch or classic? Or both? Link up - I'll add some of last year's Christmas posts as I've been so slack this December so far. I do have a Christmas eBay special coming up though!

Lakota x

Merry Christmas!

Wishing you all a joyous day with family and friends
[and the household appliance of your dreams]

Lakota x

Nearly here...

The mince pies have been made (and eaten. And made again...)

All food should have edible glitter

Nativities have been watched, baby Jesus has been dropped, and one star was particularly squishy.

Boy2 shining [with Tim Minchin's hair]

Presents have been sent from as far away as Australia

Included from Kylie was this fantastic kids' annual

She also sent amazing linens and caramel koalas. Swoon.

[K, I know they were for the boys. They got some, honest guv]

And from stars who are closer to home

Decoration from Miss Tea

A nautical scarf from Kat

I'm not quite Kirstie, but there are a few homemade touches here and there

This was going to be for a child, but I thought better of it.

Note the pocket to maximise present potential

Pasta angel hanging out with the mitten

Gingerbread house

Cereal box and wrapping paper wreath

The cake. 

Jay-Z was delighted with his bling from Hip-hop Santa

We're in Wales as of tomorrow so leaving it all behind. Aside from the presents and a vast Christmas cake. That comes with, balanced on a boy. Maybe the elves will have packed everything away again by the time we get home. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas or a Happy Channukah (both, if you're my in-laws).

Lakota x

PS. Did you see the linky post for the Christmas swap? If you've done a post on your gifts, link up here.

Don't be 'a stranger to love' this Christmas...

It's the time of year that Boots run an advert on a permanent loop, showing some bunch of shrieking harpies elbowing each other in the ladies' loos as they apply 'shimmering party eyegloss' and tong their hair effortlessly with one hand, and one is forced on nights out with previously normal colleagues who suddenly resemble Little Mix rolled in glue and glitter. [Yes I know I said I liked Christmas. I do. But I can't maintain a Pollyanna attitude indefinitely.]

Otherwise achingly modern magazines prefer to merely lift an article from the archives of around 1958, assuming that if women work at all, it will be in an office, and that we're all dying to impress 'Tony from Accounts' by donning something spangly over the top of our normal work attire. [Just add dangly earrings and a sequinned bolero and he'll be looking at you in a whole new light! I'm not sure why it's always 'Accounts' either. The department has been called 'Finance' since at least 1994]. If you already have a partner, or just aren't interested in an over-weight credit controller in a shiny Next shirt, tough. Christmas parties are all about finding LOVE! 

Lifebuoy soap advert from Tit-Bits magazine December 1957

Once you've primped, preened and adorned yourself with novelty jewellery of the flashing kind - just make sure you're 'careful enough about personal freshness'. Man-made fibres and a few too many eggnogs in a crowded function room can result in a man-repelling whiff - and 'perfumes and deodorants are not enough'. Yes, apparently Lifebuoy soap was the equivalent of Lynx for the ladies back in the day, getting 'right into the pores' and ensuring you went from stinky man-repeller to engaged and fragrant fox in the blink of an eye.

Charm your troubles away, ladies!

Lakota x