Apologies for the lack of blogging recently. I had a slew of Christmassy posts lined up, but we had some sad news ten days ago.  My lovely mother-in-law, who had seemed to be on the mend after her illness in the run up to Thanksgiving, died suddenly and the Husband rushed back to England for the second time in a fortnight to spend time with his father and help organise and attend the funeral.

This time we made the decision not to send the Minx.  She still finds the concept of death pretty abstract, and we thought was still too young to attend a funeral.  We were so glad and relieved that she and the Husband had flown back to see his mother just before her death and that they all had some final precious memories to share.

So the Minx and I were left on our own last week, trying to be as Christmassy as possible. Single parents everywhere, I have absolutely NO CLUE how you do it.  We made our becoming-annual Christmas pilgrimage to Whistler yesterday, so Santa had to get all his ducks in a row before this weekend, and getting Christmas organised for a week on my own was incredibly stressful. Not helped by the fact that when my mind goes into ‘organiser super extreme’ mode, I find it unbelievably difficult to switch off and ended up with terrible insomnia. All of which is by way of explaining why blogging ground to a bit of a halt.

We were so fortunate that the Husband got on one of the last flights to escape from the UK on Friday and so we managed to get to Whistler safe and sound. I’ll be doing a few posts here – the Minx and the Husband are skiing, but I can’t ski because of my arthritic knee, so will be doing some extreme loafing about instead.  I won’t be able to catch up on Advent Calendar posts as I haven’t photographed all the new stuff (it’s super fun, though, more when we get back from Whistler) but I will keep you up to date with sock monkey progress. There’s still a lot to do, and only five days to do it, so it’s going to be a race to the finish.

In the meantime, the Minx and I did manage to decorate our tree last week when the Husband was away, and it amazed me yet again how much our tree has mutated from a tasteful gold and silver affair before the Minx was born, to a tasteless mishmash of colourful tat. But we love it anyway.

The prize for the most tasteless ornament goes hands down to this small creepy child with a candy cane growing out of her head.  It was carefully selected by the Minx on our first Christmas in Seattle when she was not yet two and every year is lovingly hung on one of the lower branches of the tree so it can admired all the more.

Do you want to share your decorations? Got any REALLY tasteless ones that we need to admire? Share a link to photos or to a blog post below.  (I’ve included a link to this blog post below, so you can see how the Linky works).

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