Tag: christmas

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Christmas preparations

Christmas preparations at the house have started slowly.

I’ve decided that Olive deserved a bit of Christmas bling so she has been draped with cool LED lights and a few paper baubles that are light enough not to damage her fragile, spindly branches.

She also has a few paper birds dangling from her boughs in which the cats are already expressing great interest.

Olive in her finery

She looks rather splendid bedecked with her paper balls and I’m debating whether or not to put up a Christmas tree as well, or whether she’s festive enough on her own. At the moment I’m leaning towards letting her be the star of the festivities.

A few Christmas decorations have slowly crept into the house.

Mostly it will be fresh evergreens and twigs that I’ll cut a few days before Christmas for the table, but is it even Christmas without a scattering of candles and fairy lights?

Beeswax candles for the Christmas table

On these dark days so close to the winter solstice when the daylight fades by early afternoon, I feel that we need all the light that we can get to cheer us in our wintering.

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Cranberry fest starts

It’s a dreich day here on the island – cold, grey and rainy – so I decided to make my annual batch of cranberry mincemeat for Christmas.

I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with mincemeat. Cranberry mincemeat, which I discovered about ten years ago, seemed to be the perfect antidote to that. Less clove-heavy and dark. More fruity and zesty.

However I’ve increasingly started to dislike the texture of suet in my mincemeat, even vegetarian suet, but most recipes use it for shelf stability and preservation purposes so it’s in most things. I could replace it with butter, and some recipes do, but I haven’t experimented with that yet.

Cooking down

I’ve found a recipe that doesn’t use any fat at all (I’m really not anti-fat, but it seemed worth a try) and although the cooked mincemeat will only last six weeks or so in jars in the fridge, I can always freeze any left after that time has elapsed.

The final result

And I think it’s going to be worth it for the fresh, zesty taste that it will add to sweet pies and crumbles. I tasted as I cooked and it’s delicious.

The recipe is here https://fromthelarder.co.uk/cranberry-cointreau-mincemeat/

I’ll start making my cranberry frangipane mince pies once we hit December and try and stash a bag or two of them in the freezer for walk-ins.

There’s always a flurry of baking activity when the fresh cranberries are for sale. I also made this cranberry traybake. Just because.

It should have been drizzled with icing but I’m afraid we showed all the restraint of a bunch of goats rampaging through a willow patch and it didn’t happen. ..

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‘Tis the season

It’s the season of evening fires, big skies, woolly socks, sleeping cats and warming food.

Winter is upon us, and although it’s not that cold yet, the trees are bare and the nights are stretching, dark and long.

It is dark now by 4.30pm and we make sure that the log basket is filled before then and that the woodburner is lit.

It’s a ritual that I love, turning the lights on, lighting candles in the living area and generally making things cosy. The crackling of the logs and the faint scent of woodsmoke are an essential part of winter.

The cats are usually in and sleeping if the weather is wet or windy, and it’s often both.

We bought a couple of extra chairs this week so that we can accommodate eight around the dining table more comfortably at Christmas. We have family staying plus friends and it’ll save us having to wheel office chairs in.

My love affair with old Ercol pieces continues. These are cowhorn chairs, as they’re called, solidly made of English elm, dating back to the 1950s. Elm is a lovely wood. Ercol are still making these today, but they’re no longer made of elm as there’s none left after Dutch Elm Disease ravaged the English forests over the last fifty years.

They join the mismatched crew of chairs from our previous lives around my old French oak dining table, made from trees felled in a French forest after the big storms of 1995.

I like that our furniture has had lives. It may be a bit shabby but it suits us.

We also unpacked my old sewing machine at last, so I’ve had a bit of a rearrange in my study to set it up and make a little space for sewing and another for reading and watching the world go by.

I can’t wait to get my easels in there and a work table so that I can also paint.

And get some art up onto the walls. It’s still all in the shed with the remaining boxes awaiting the walls to be finished. The house looks empty without art.

Soon, soon.

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Christmas Reading

I promised myself that I wouldn’t buy any books whilst in the extremely restricted living space of the caravan. I promised myself. But it seems that I have an addiction that is very difficult to shake.

Books have always been a big part of my life.

One of my earliest happy memories of Christmas is opening a gift-wrapped book. The smell of the paper and printing ink. The tactile pleasure of handling it, feeling the slight roughness of a linen book cover. The crisp turning of its new pages. The pleasure of curling up quietly on a sofa and losing myself deeply in its world. These are things I’ve always loved.

I couldn’t resist buying a few books to read over this festive break. It seemed sort of traditional.

Besides. Alan Garner has just published a new book at the age of 87. It would seem rude not to support such a momentous undertaking. I first read his novel The Owl Service at the age of eight, and I found it deeply disturbing, and very powerful. So much so that the memory of the book stayed with me, and when forty years later I came across a copy of it in a secondhand book store, I had to buy it to read again as an adult. It was still a strongly evocative, disturbing book.

His new book, Treacle Walker, is apparently based on the legends around Alderney Edge in Cheshire, where the author still lives.

I shall wrap it in festive paper and gift it to myself for Christmas. I shall find some quiet moments to absorb it.

It’s over fifty years now since I first read his work and I feel that Mr Garner and I are overdue a revisit.

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Christmas thoughts

It’s beginning to look as if we have another uncertain Christmas on our hands with the latest Covid variant running amok globally. I was hoping that this year would be different, but I guess we need to realise that this may be the new normal. Husband and I have our booster shots booked in for next week, and it feels like it’s not a moment too soon.

We may have one of the stepsons with us for Christmas, we may not. His travel plans are a bit up in the air just like everything else in the world at the moment. I’ve ordered supplies as if we have him here, happily eating us out of house and home. Well, caravan and home really.

Last year we cooked a piece of venison in the slow cooker for Christmas lunch. This year we have a piece of local highland beef, and with a year of kitchen juggling experience under my belt, moving things in and out of my tiny caravan oven, I’m hopeful that there will be roast potatoes too.

I only really start to feel as if Christmas is a reality when I see the lights start to go up in the village cottages and I’ve written and posted my Christmas cards. Christmas has always been such a big thing in my life. I’m getting used to a second year of no table, no big gathering, and life in a wee space where the normal arrangements can’t be made. We will definitely be in the house for next Christmas.

However different and sparse Christmas arrangements might be this year, I am grateful above all that we are all well. Health and happiness are so much more important than any of the other trappings that we associate with this time of the year. I will gather berries and foliage to decorate the caravan, put up some fairy lights, plan trifles and mince pies to take to friends, but mostly just savour the time that we have together.

Wishing you all a stress-free and happy run-up to the holiday period. Remember, it’s about the people that you love, not whether you’ve managed to bag the last turkey in the shop.

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Orangettes

I’ve been scanning local shops for small gifts for friends and neighbours for Christmas. I’m always trying to be sustainable, so any gifts that I make myself can only be a good thing.

I’m experimenting with making homemade chocolate nut clusters and orangettes . Orangettes are something I fell in love with when I lived in France – candied orange peel dipped in chocolate. These are relatively expensive to buy and aren’t easy to find in our local shops.

Orangettes

I started by scrubbing and peeling a few organic oranges, lemons and limes. I re-wrapped the fruit to use another time, and popped it in the fridge. The peel was sliced into thin strips and boiled for fifteen minutes, drained, and repeated twice. This is to remove the bitterness from the pith, apparently.

Naked citrus fruit

Next up is a simple sugar syrup – just sugar and water- to which the drained peels are added and simmered gently for an hour.

They’re then scooped out, rolled in caster sugar and dried on a rack overnight.

Drying with a sugar coating

This morning I melted both dark and milk chocolate in a bowl over hot water on the hob, and dipped the fruit peels. They’re currently on drying racks chilling in the fridge ready for testing later. (Although I’ve had a few sneaky pieces just for quality control purposes already😊)

The residual boiling syrup is pale yellow, infused with a delicate citrus taste, and tastes too good to waste, so I’ve poured it into a jar ready to add to my next gin cocktail (like we have those so often here on the croft 😂) or to drizzle over cakes or desserts.

I think that these will make nice, simple gifts for neighbours, which I’ll pop into paper bags or small gift boxes. They didn’t cost much (oranges, sugar, good chocolate) and they taste so much nicer than shop bought. I love that these are made with the peel and that I can re-use the syrup so that all the fruit is used in some way.

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Gaelic singers, fires and venison

Our first island Christmas.

Last night we attended an outdoor meal with friends around a fire, with local musicians and Gaelic singers. They sang traditional carols but also songs that we didn’t know, hauntingly beautiful in the open air and the darkness of the night.

It was a cold night but we honestly didn’t feel it. Such a lovely introduction to Christmas here.

We returned home smelling of woodsmoke and with heads full of new melodies and happy memories.

This morning, Christmas Day, and it was a day alone for us. The wind howled around the caravan and we sat in front of the fire with big socks on and shared a zoom call with the boys in Manchester.

We ate venison and drank red wine and enjoyed the feeling of peacefulness and nothing that we absolutely had to do.

It’s been a very unusal and quiet Christmas, but a good one for all that. It’s made us remember what’s important and has made us look forward to next year’s celebration with family (and a proper kitchen!) all the more.

Merry Christmas to you all. From the fireside of the caravan on the windswept hillside of the croft I’m sending you all good wishes for health and happiness, wherever you are.

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Festive thoughts from the croft

Like many people in these troubled times, Christmas for us this year will not be as it usually is.

Apart from the fact that we’ll be spending it in an ancient caravan perched on the side of a rain-swept hill, we will also not have the kids with us. It will just be husband and myself on the day.

We’re conscious that they are many others who don’t have a roof over their heads, good health, or enough to eat this Christmas. We’re very blessed that we don’t fall into any of these categories.

We will be together. We’ll be warm and dry with enough to eat. Our loved ones are safe, and we’ll be able to share calls with them on the day.

The house build is progressing, albeit slowly, and stands there, a promise to come and the culmination of many years of planning and hard work. We awake to this promise, along with some incredible sunrises, every day.

During the bizarre awfulness which 2020 has been, I count this all as success.

Wishing you all a peaceful, happy Christmas.

See you on the other side.

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Croft Christmas Tree

It’s a blustery, cold winters day here on the island right now.

Whilst husband is working in the house, preparing the walls for foil, I’m keeping busy in the caravan until I can be helpful, cooking, staying warm by the fire and listening to a Ted Hughes audio book.

We have no room in the caravan for a Christmas tree, but I couldn’t contemplate any kind of Christmas without one.

I ordered a very small, rooted tree from a nursery on the island, and it arrived yesterday. It’s now potted up in an old whisky barrel planter just outside the caravan. We can see it from the sitting area window. We can plant it on the croft in the New Year as it’s a native fir.

Conscious that I didn’t want battery lights or to add any more electrical load to the caravan, I’d bought solar tree lights.

This was a bit of a leap of faith, to be honest. We only get approximately six hours daylight at our northern latitude at this, the darkest time of the year. It was always a bit of a lottery as to whether this would be enough to power the tree lights for an evening or whether the whole thing would be a washout.

But it worked. Despite it being a totally grey, overcast day, as soon as the light dimmed at 4pm the solar lights came on. Our wee Croft Christmas tree is twinkling away in the darkness, probably entertaining the deer and definitely adding a bit of festive cheer to the building site.