It's beginning to look a lot like...

7 gruelling hours of shopping, 2 hours of wrapping, 1 hour of fairy light unravelling and at LAST I'm beginning to feel properly festive. This is the first year in my life that I've not been on holidays for this lead up week and even I, the most manic holiday worshipper I've ever met, has been struggling a little bit. 60 hour weeks will do that to a gal, but never mind, because today! all is back to usual rum ball scented glory.

I bought plain red and plain brown butchers paper this year to wrap gifts and a length of cheap red hessian twine and it's amazing how good it looks when presents are actually stacked under the tree and following a theme. It's something I've always wanted to do, and was actually cheaper than the usual cheap gaudy wrapping paper I usually do and I love it. Love, with a makes-my-heart-do-a-little-jig-every-time-I-see-it bounce.

I also unravelled the Ikea snowflakes to hang over the window and the new icicle lights and my whole house now glows gently with the magic that is fairylights. I can gleefully sit in my living room now and just gaze on the prettiness. The way that the lights bounce off the glass baubles (that no longer inhabit the bottom 50cm of the tree) and off the varnish of the porcelain figurines. The silly singing/dancing plush toys at the base of the tree for the Possum and the Monkey to turn on obsessively throughout the day, cackling away as they groove along to Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.

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I headed to Spotlight yesterday after a family lunch and bought the material and pattern for the girls' Christmas dresses and even if I'm up at midnight on Christmas Eve (which is entirely possible as I'm working all this week) they will be done in time. I've gone for super plain, and I hope they work, but the girls will wear them anyway, because along with chocolate caramel slice, my potent rumballs and a dodgy Christmas pudding they are tradition and we won't have it any other way (or at least I won't and for one day a year everyone panders to me muahahahaha).

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I had a horrible heart sick moment on Thursday night (coming home late from work after the girls were in bed), chatting with Bingley when he said that the Elfling doesn't believe in Santa any more because all the other kids in her class don't, and had told her he was really just her Mum and Dad. I was so upset I cried, because while a lot of people pooh pooh it, and say it's just as special when kids don't believe, it's not true. There is something in watching a child who truly believes that makes my magic believing heart sing. Plus I believe in Santa (obviously) and having a child that doesn't, especially at just 6 (and with 2 younger siblings) made me sad. I want my Elfling to hold onto her tenuous grip on fairyland for as long as she can. She's not the most imaginative child; loving, caring, cheeky, beautiful, but not imaginative. And listening to her stories about Santa and Christmas are things I treasure every year, because there is such innocence and hope and beauty in them.

But no matter, because on Saturday as we ate our poached eggs for breakfast, she thoughtfully told me that she was going to leave her letter for Santa with his cookies and milk so he could have a present too, and that she wondered how it was that Rudolph knew the way even if he did have a very bright nose. And my heart did little fist pumps and I bit my lip hard and concurred that that sounded like a very nice thing to do while stifling the urge to click my heels.

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I started singing again today. I have been on some strange hiatus lately where I've not been humming, singing or even thinking of singing for some weeks. But perhaps because Christmas carols are as compulsory as rumballs, or perhaps because I just feel cheery and like sharing the love I find myself spontaneously singing aloud. Even at work, where having some festive cheer is needed to keep a warm buffer from the sadness that is the necessity of a hospital needing to be working over this season. I don't only sing Christmas songs, but there is something about Silent Night and the First Noel that makes me glad that I once used to sing in a choir. They're such beautiful hymns, though not quite as spine tingling as when I would sit in church with Mum and Dad and tinsel angel wings and sing the same songs.

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We watched Up last night. If you haven't, you should. I cried in the first 10 minutes, and laughed a lot of the rest. We very much have a Carl and Ellie relationship here, and as Bingley patted my head and promised me, we will see our Paradise Falls some day.

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I like the new blogger layout very much indeed. Huge thumbs up.

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I have to go and start making a plum pudding right now, and piecing the material for the girls' dresses and possibly put some tinsel in my hair. But I'm endlessly distracted by the glinting of the lights through the windows and muted through the soft curtains. I can just sit here and absorb it all into my skin until it tingles. There is such magic you see in the beautiful twinkling. There are flashes of lightning outside, and the grey clouds are softly closing in for the evening in what promises to be another soggy week, and it's electrifying up and down my skin. There are so many things that are taking so much from me at the moment, but one finds them very easy to manage - as fairylights make life worth living.