My Christmas card to you

My usual pattern of behaviour at Christmas is to be in total denial until the first card hits the mat on 1 December (Christmas? Oh, is it Christmas soon?) then some frantic activity so that 2 days before Christmas I'm feeling smug as it is all done.

BUT NOT THIS YEAR

Two days left before the present opening, the wine drinking and the turkey eating and I have not wrapped a thing, have three more presents to buy, one to knit and batches and batches of sausage rolls and mince pies to make.

But I have been having a lot of fun and doing a bit of foreign travel

Before that I managed to get the presents that needed posting off, including the hand knit ones

And put up the tree

And just to give me a little extra to do decided to make a gingerbread house with a difference with TLM (I haven't mentioned her for a while so in case you have popped in for the first time she is The Little Model, my granddaughter who likes to try on the things I  knit) - we made a nativity scene

But what about the foreign travel bit? Well a little on the spur of the moment my friend The Famous Writer and I flew to Berlin last Friday for nearly three days in the luxurious Hotel Adlon.  I'll tell more about the fabulous hotel and our wonderful time in a later post, it was so lovely the hotel deserves a post all of it's own. But for the moment, here is the view from our Breakfast table at the hotel

And this the Berliner Dome in the part of the city that was once East Berlin so wonderfully lit (as are many of the buildings) and where we heard Bach's Christmas Oratorio on our first night there.

Finally last night the holidays really began chez chopkinsknits when ten friends from my knitting group came for our Christmas supper in my studio

Happy Christmas Everyone

xx

c

P.S. that present I have yet to knit? It is likely to be given as a promise on Christmas day, a promise that it will be finished in time for the recipient to keep warm on the station platform as he returns to work in the New Year