IT’S ALL OVER !!! All the preparation and cost, and it is done with no return 🙁

We had a great time this year (not that we don’t other years) and this was obviously slightly special, with it being our first family Christmas.  Even though we asked people to not buy much for Elliot as he does not understand the specifics of Christmas yet, it seems that we still managed to amass a huge amount of gifts.  Father Christmas certainly found our house OK this year, and the lack of a chimney seemed to not deter the kind natured fellow.  Elliot awoke us at around 5am and we all got up at 6am (Simon’s Mum, Bernhard, Jenny, Justin, Daniel and Winston joined us this year) to have bacon sandwiches and gift wrapping removal.  I think it is extremely fair to say that all did exceptionally well and the chap in the red suit is welcome back at ForkHall without question 🙂

We walked down to Vicky’s Mum’s house (as the venue for lunch and fun activities for the day) after dropping Jenny, Justin, Daniel and a whole heap of food off first (well, and Justin coating the inside of Simon’s car with a nice helping of Chocolate Cake – I won’t write what Jenny called him – suffice to say Simon found it firstly funny and secondly shocked to hear the words being uttered from his sister’s mouth.

The rest of the day was awesome – a great feast bestowed upon us, with copious amounts of Châteaux-Neuf Du Pape to wash it all down.  A pool tournament where Phil and Dave simply whooped Simon’s ass good and proper – congratulations for Justin for becoming the ultimate champion of the table.  The day finishing up in the real pool, where some lazed about in the hot tub, others kicked in in the pool itself, and those who preferred to keep their dignity played at BUZZ on the projection screen whilst watching the idiots making fools of themselves in the pool area 🙂

A great day yesterday – THANK YOU to all who made it possible, and especially Greg and Sue for hosting the entire day.  A note for Richard who seemed to spend the whole day filling peoples glasses AND THEN who ended up keeping the pool house dry by squeegee’ing the place down each and every time some sorry fellow got out of the pool and wet the floor 🙂 top job man.

Then today, Simon’s mum and entourage left for home at around 10:30AM, and Simon, Vicky and Elliot head out to Bridlington to see Paula and Richard.  Once again, we had a fab afternoon since Paula and her mum laid on a lovely buffet, and with their friends and neighbours the conversations were lively also.  It always seems like we have only just arrived when we are leaving and that time has been cut short (I guess we don’t see a lot of them anymore) but I’m sure we’ll catch up again soon.

Simon just has Becca’s new laptop to fix – seems that the SYSTEM part of the registry was broken at 9:25am on Christmas Day – he is on with fixing it now…….