Festive...?

This is the point after the erection of the tree (involving carrying it around, sawing bits off, huffing and swearing) and before the dressing of the tree (involving the loss of a box of decorations and so searching under all the beds, tidying the garage, emptying the shed, lots more huffing and swearing...) It looks lovely now, mind, but the whole debacle definitely confirms my believe that it's as well to just go to work and leave the whole business to the girls... Hector, as you can see, is in two minds about the whole business. We were going to round the day off with a trip to the Aurora illuminations at Rufford Abbey but it turns out, this being a council initiative, that you have to have pre-booked your tickets during office hours this year, so we're going to try again next week instead (though there was further swearing, on my part at least, I was quite grumpy by this point...) We wandered up to enjoy the lights of Mapperley as an alternative ("no need to go to Blackpool" as the mad old feller outside Costa told us), went for a drink and then had a chippy tea, so, yes, we managed to end up feeling fairly festive after all...