Christmas morning, I woke up early and lay in bed for a long time, wondering if Wendy and Sue were ever going to stir. Sue and I had gotten a bit shirty (defined as throwing your toys out of the pram) about when we would do gifts. Just a bit. I come from a tradition of opening gifts on Christmas Eve because that was what my father’s family had done, a legacy of my Swedish great-grandmother. When Sue was growing up, presents were opened first things Christmas morning. Wendy was running Christmas, though, and she made us wait until afternoon after dinner for the big unwrapping, can you believe it?

As it turned out, Wendy orchestrated the loveliest Christmases I’ve had in a long time. We all had our various breakfasts with our various milks in our various tea. (Wendy, decafe with semi-skimmed milk; Sue, decafe tea with lactose free milk; Elena, caffeinated tea with oat milk). Then we dove into the stockings for the small gifts.

Dinner (actually lunch) was early afternoon. Wendy set a lovely table with placemats on a red polka-dotted tablecloth; candles, and crackers by each plate. We had turkey crown, sausage stuffing balls, pigs-in-blankets, Yorkshire pudding, potatoes rubbed in goose fat and roasted, parsnips in a honey glaze, boiled carrots, sprouts, broccoli and peas; and elderberry cordial.

We pulled our crackers. Let me enlighten the Americans who don’t know what a cracker is.  Basically, it’s like an empty toilet paper roll with three little items inside: a paper crown, a small toy and a piece a paper (called a motto) with an unfunny joke or silly riddle. (Mine was What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta.) But I did get an interesting little toy called a mystery calculator, the mystery and the calculations I’ve yet to figure out. I meant to do it on the airplane home.

Anyway, the toilet paper roll is wrapped in Christmas paper with ties on the end into which are embedded dots of gunpowder like we used to have in cap guns. You pull one side of your cracker and your neighbor at the table pulls the other and bang! Joy, Wendy’s sister who had arrived with piles of gifts and a vicious cough, pulled a cracker with me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we raced reindeer. Many years ago the Christmas crackers had contained wind-up reindeer and they had become part of the festivities ever since. We all took reindeers, wound them up and raced them to the middle of the table. No one won.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joy had made a gluten-free Christmas cake for me to have all to myself. She had made one for me several years ago but the postage to Seattle had been prohibitive so they saved it for when I came to visit nine months later. You can do that with a Christmas cake because it’s preserved with brandy. It’s a fruitcake with a topping of marzipan. Then the whole thing is encased in an almond paste fondant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By now it was nearly 3:00 and I wondering (child that I am) if we were ever getting to the gifts.

“Do we have to listen to the King’s speech first?” I asked.

“Certainly not, “said Sue with a withering look.

At 3:00, every Christmas Day for 70 years, Queen Elizabeth had addressed the nation. This was to be the first King’s speech. We were well into our gifts when he came on the television and I looked up from all the wrappings. It was short. And it was very sweet. I looked at Wendy, the monarchist in the family. “I’m going to cry,” I said. And I did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We piled all the (mostly) chocolate that we had amassed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I went for a walk as it was getting dark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We all watched the second Fishermen’s Friends movie, had a cup of tea and went to bed.

The next morning, Boxing Day, I asked, “How are you two feeling?”

Wendy: “Oh not too bad.” She looked exhausted.

Sue: “I feel rough.” But she was dressed up to go out.

I left the two of them to hold up the empire and went for a walk on the Compton Road loop again, finishing up at the farm shop for another chat with Lucy.

Sue and I follow a thing on social media called Very British Problems. A posting on Boxing Day read, “Right. What’s the cheese situation?” One of the comments was “A modest surfeit lurks in the fridge.” That was our situation, too.  Cheese and chocolate are a feature of the holiday. Another is The Panto (short for pantomime.)

We went to a panto in Yeoville, about 40 minutes south of Butleigh. I’ll start by saying I had never seen anything like it. We don’t have anything remotely like it in America. It’s not mime and it’s certainly not silent. It’s a fairy tale (we saw Dick Whittington) acted by men playing women and women playing men, audience participation, slapstick comedy, outrageous puns (but much better than the ones in the crackers) and the audience “always gets wet,” said Sue.

There’s always a villain (Sue had played a villainous Rat in a panto earlier in December, a performance I would have loved to see and she got rave reviews.)  There’s always a dame played by a man. Our Dame Dolly was big and round and had enormous pink cupcakes boobs, an image I will never, ever get out of my head.

The audience participation was fun. Booing at the villain, screaming at the sailor to look behind him, singing along on some of the songs. Gas bubbles and streamers were ejected into the audience several times. The actors ran down the aisles with super-soakers and sprayed everyone. I adored it.

However, it was loud. Way too loud for me so I again put in ear-plugs and that helped. At the interval, I left Sue and Wendy to get ice cream—that’s another feature of the panto—and went for a walk to calm my ears. I meant to go around the block and I thought I had but in no time, I was lost and had to ask for directions of a couple who walked me back to the theater.

In the second act, Sue on my right, asked me to ask Wendy for one of her throat sweets. I leaned over to Joy on my left.

“Sue needs one of Wendy’s throat sweets.”

One was passed to me and I promptly dropped it by Joy’s leg. I leaned down to get it. It seemed to move left and I kept reaching until I had pushed Joy into Wendy.

“What are you doing?” Sue asked.

“Trying to get you your bloody sweet,” I said. “I need another,” I whispered to Joy.

“Here,” said Wendy holding out a second one, which she then dropped.

The third one made it to Sue about the time the super-soakers came down the aisle.

It could have been part of the show.

 

More images from Christmas Day