It’s not a real Christmas until you’ve got a gingerbread house and have demolished it during a long game of Monopoly. Better than last year’s.

Cute and christmas-pudding-based bonbons from Nigella. Tasty alongside the adorable name. Recipe here.

Cute hand-made decorations. Getting into some Christmas craft after suddenly noticing I’d neglected to do any. Felt’s so fun to make little things out of (see: finger puppets). Spell little words, or make each one with each person’s initial on. Via a pretty obvious tutorial at say yes to hoboken.

We went for an adventure, for a walk in the woods. Because, on driving to my house in the morning down snowy roads, a road – a not-especially-fancy road – that runs by a wood had become a beautiful little snow scene. Someone else had thought the same and leapt out of their car to take a photo. Cue squeaky excitement from me. Snow makes everything look so nice. Even dustbins, which are not nice things. See, it’s magic.

Here is a photo of the spot I liked the most, because I’m a girl and think kissing gates are the shit. And there was snow on them.

We walked across train tracks, made footprints in the fresh snow and planted a leaf on the line.
Then I fell over onto my hands and knees. SPLAT, like a toddler.

We found some trees that looked like Christmas trees.
We stomped up a hill.
I found a cave in a giant snowy bamboo plant.
We saw two dogs. And one red sled.

We found a rope swing. I sat on it, too scared to launch myself into the tiny tiny ravine and cross at myself for being so. When I was a kid I used to hurl myself out of our apple tree hanging on a rope. At some point, I stopped jumping out of trees and got scared of such things. Then I accidentally lost my footing, which solved the problem. I grinned a lot of swung around an awful lot.

Then we went to the car and I did skids around the snowed-up and deserted carpark under the guide of a learning exercise.

It was lovely.

When I lived by the seafront in Brighton I lived in an art deco flat. I lived with a lovely girl who spent her time talking to people’s heads at a hospital. For a while she’d spent some time learning how to be an architect. For the most part though, she worked at the hospital and in the time when she was not there she hunted around old shops for interesting things and made crafts.

On the wall in our flat was a big old poster that had once been in a school. On it were chalky pictures of a newt’s life-cycle (I say newt, because the newt was the biggest and most eye-catching part of the cycle) on a background that looked like blackboard – if a blackboard was ever to take on a flimsy and material texture, that is.

There was an array of 1960s furniture, and among the polish porcupines and pomanders and other Christmassy crafts that slowly mounted up towards the end of November this will stick in my mind. Some of it was long and harsh and metal, and some of it was more lovely, distinctive and unpretentious. I took idle notes. (One note was never to stack such large quantities of Elle magazines artfully everywhere. I spent a lot of time knocking them over and picking them up.)

There was a chair waiting to be upholstered. It was orange and warm-looking. I liked it as it was. I came across this on Etsy (because it is 2am and this is, apparently, what certain females look at when sat in front of a laptop at 2am) which reminded me of it. It’s very nice, though perhaps I would say this of most retro-style furniture on a wooden floor. On the downside, it doesn’t look good to hurl yourself into after a long day (these are not armrests for throwing legs over). It would also, in order to be complete, need a large wicker basket full of wool by its side with some knitting I’d started but of course forgotten about, as I am wont to do.

And in other news, these are pretty lovely too. I am pretty (read: very) fussy about ornament and cluttery bits, but these get my vote. They would require acquiring single flowers which is not something I do so much, but I will have both for an imaginary place in my head.

I am curious as to what I would fill rooms with, given a choice. Wood, books, and daffodils, I suspect.