goodwill

I'm sat at the dining room table at my mum's house, in that gorgeous lull after presents have been opened and before (long before) Christmas dinner is ready.

So, as usual, I'm starting to have that lovely, slightly nostalgic, Christmassy feeling -- thinking about Christmases gone by, and how much things have changed.

This is the first Christmas when I have really, properly, been living away from home. Of course, at uni I was living away from home for the majority of the year, but now I don't have the great long prescriptive holidays -- I now have 'annual leave' to contend with.

I think having only a limited number of allocated days when I can come home home makes me appreciate it all the more. When I first started uni, Dad said "You'll come back from uni after all that excitement and change and be amazed when you see everything at home is completely the same -- your life will be going at such a fast pace, it'll seem strange when you come back and nothing here will have changed!"

In many ways, he was right. Life at uni (and now working life) did, and does, seem to go very quickly. But I think Dad might have been worried that when I came back for holidays, home would seem a bit dull and predictable in comparison. In actual fact, 'predictable' or, rather, 'comfortable' is exactly what I want when I come home! When everything else feels a little overwhelming and grown-up, coming home and feeling utterly at home and comfy is perfection!

At no other time is this feeling felt stronger than at Christmas. As a Christian, Christmas has a very special significance to me anyway, but it's also a time of year that is embraced by everyone. If not the historic and theological importance, the cultural feeling of familiarity and cosiness is something that everyone can appreciate -- and we love it!

So, thank God for Christmas. Thank God for family, friends, and for the wafts of Christmas dinner floating through our houses.

foxed

So I haven't written a post in, oh, a decade. I shall give you an excuse explanation. Well, you see, it's been Christmas, and as you know from previous posts I've been more than a tad excitable of late, and I have allowed preparations for the festive season to pretty much commandeer my life for the past few weeks.

Also, I've started a new notebook (journal, of sorts) after finishing my latest one a few weeks ago. It is, needless to say, a thing of utter and complete beauty and I'm pretty attached. It always takes a little while to get used to a new notebook and to get over initial excitement about binding, paper quality, and to decide whether a .5 or .7 nib would be best, etc. (yes, I know...). 

However! the preliminary zeal has somewhat subsided so I've now begun to think of my poor neglected blog once again.

Well, that was until I discovered this. Or, rather, my excellent mum bought me a year's subscription to it as a Christmas present. It is difficult - nay, impossible - to convey the sheer beauty and perfection of 'the real reader's quarterly'. Suffice it to say, it came tied in a green ribbon and asked me to put aside 'the challenge of the e-book and other similar worries' in the note from the editors. Need I go on?

I spent much of this afternoon curled up in front of the fire, gliding my way through my first issue (no. 28) and dreaming of working for such a gorgeous company. If you're remotely interested in reading, I beseech you - try it.

So, in short, all these things have led to the neglect of ol' goshkate.blogspot. So, in the next few days and weeks I shall address this injustice (as well as the hideously lingering guilt of the inexcusable abandonment of the goshkate presence on YouTube), and cast aside my new glittering literary appendages in favour of the old dependable blog.

Huzzah for that!

giddy

So, that festive spirit I was talking about? Well, it's well and truly hit. Seriously, thinking about Christmas-related joys has had me scrunching my toes with glee for days.

So, we decorated our (somewhat bijoux) Christmas tree the other day - in a much similar vein to last year, but with the promise of additions - and we've got a house Secret Santa on the go. Tonight is the English Department Christmas Party, and one of my tutors said she'd be bringing mince pies to our seminar next week (softening the potential blow of getting our marked essays back...). I am literally so excited!

I had my first mince pie of the year on Sunday night at my church's first carol service of the season - there was a brass quintet! I have truly regressed back to the mentality of a child; all thought of social etiquette went hurtling out of the window at the sound of "Hark The Herald" and I whooped and clapped at their instrumental encores as we were munching mince pies. And there's more.

The snow. Oh, the snow.

We've had pretty much continual snow for over a week - I'm talking icicles over a metre long, snow drifts up to my thighs, -17 degrees C, the whole caboodle. It's bloomin mint! Even in my little studenty house where I can see my breath in my bedroom, I'm loving the snow. And that in turn has made me fall in love with the North East even more. When the snow hits London, virtually everything stops. When the snow hits the North East, they send men out with shovels in front of the buses to keep them running. Well, almost.

I just love the hardiness of the North Easterners - and I think it's catching. I find myself going out without a coat, going barefoot in the snow to take the bins out, and climbing over next door's wall to get out of my house because my gate is blocked with snow. There's a spirit of "let's just get on with it", and man it's refreshing.

So, here I am in our little winter wonderland - with numb toes but aching for Christmas.

chilled

First frost this morning! Had me slipping and sliding all the way to the Metro station... Felt incontrovertibly twee in my tweed coat with a little thermos in my leather satchel, but hey, I'm a third year.

I'm getting so genuinely excited about Christmas now - Fenwicks has unveiled its Christmas window display (an annual festive event) and Starbucks have started playing their Christmas mix. Now, I did have a moment - lasting all of about five minutes - during which I bemoaned the commercialisation of Christmas and how outrageous it is that the Halloween sweets were, for a surreal week or so, displayed alongside the Advent calendars. But, needless to say, it didn't last. I'm as giddy as a kipper wearing a Rudolph nose, and am biding my time before I put Christmas music on my iPod (1st December is reasonable, isn't it?).

We leave uni for the Christmas holidays on 17th December so I reckon we'll put our decorations up on the 1st-ish. So exciting! My new housemates seem well up for the festivities, so I reckon we'll be increasing our supplies of Christmas decks and spreading the joy throughout more of the house.

Eee! It's actually making my heart beat faster.

in case I don't get chance to say it

Have a lovely Christmas. Lots of mince pies and crackers and sprouts and stuffing and family and smiling.

The works.

let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

And so it has :)

well and truly

in the Christmas spirit now. I trotted off to Wilkinsons on Friday with a view to buying some serious decorations (well, as many as my impoverished student pocket could afford) - and this was the result:

Not bad, eh?