Home Sweet Christmas Season

Sloane Square, November 2011

I have returned to SW12, dear readers, and I truly loved being in the States with my family and friends for Thanksgiving but it must be admitted that I'm ready to start the festive season in London.  Since I got back to my flat via Heathrow this morning, I have been playing the Michael Bublé Christmas album on repeat; when I went to Sainsbury's this afternoon to restock my fridge, I picked up an obnoxiously red poinsettia - I love Christmas trees in other people's houses but feel some classic Old Testament guilt about having one in my own, though obviously this will have to be readdressed next year when Jon and I are shacking up again -  plus everything I need to make gingersnaps, and tomorrow's lunch mission will be to find some lovely fairy lights and perhaps even the materials to craft one of Martha's wreaths for my front door.  The Christmas spirit is upon us!

You'll get a full recap of my holiday later on in the week; I'm still a bit woozy from jetlag (I slept for the first three hours of the flight but then got distracted by the selection of movies, though to be honest I didn't think that The Help lived up to the hype) and so there's no way you'd read anything coherent if I tried to write at the moment.

I hope you had a wonderful holiday or, if you're not American, a lovely late-November weekend.  Onward and upward to December!

Sketch at Hampstead: Evening (Constable, October 1820)

(By the way, I read all three books of The Hunger Games trilogy in two and a half days while in DC.  There's a word I'm looking for to describe how I feel about them - it may be "obsessed" or possibly "fanatic," and even though I wasn't crazy about the last book the excitement of diving into the world of Panem in the first two more than made up for the anti-climactic ending.  Yes, I love Young Adult fantasy novels.  Judge me.  Extra by the way, did you hear that Anne McCaffrey died?  I went through a huge dragon-related literature phase when I was a teenager because of her.  Thank goodness the torch is being passed on, though, I guess.)