Are we all done with Christmas now? Hopefully you folks at the wrong end of the world have finished your Christmas day festivities as well, so we will all have survived the family get together and gluttonous overload.

We celebrated at our house again this year. It’s a strategic thing. If we are having everyone over for lunch it means we have to clean up. That involves doing the mad, rushing around, hiding things in cupboards, making spiders homeless, discarding a forest worth of paper, including pizza coupons that expired six months ago, school notes I forgot to read and invitations to events long since past. However, it means for at least the first couple of days of the holidays we give the appearance of a normal family with a tidy house.

Two days out from Christmas I did my back in and caught a summer cold. Which wouldn’t have mattered except Mr Shambles is a practical bloke. He had noticed in the past that when I bought cold & flu tablets I always ran out of nighttime tablets and had plenty of the daytime pills left over. So he bought a packet that was ONLY nighttime tablets. Nighttime meaning sleep inducing. I didn’t read the packet properly, I took the nighttime tablets at 8.00am in the morning.

Your getting sleepy, very sleepy.

The first sign I was in trouble was when I felt my lids getting heavy as I attempted to write a blog post. I have since decided not to post that particular blog, it got a little rambling before deteriorating to a collection of random words which failed to form any sort of coherent sentence.

I moved to lounge where I proceeded to sleep for the next four hours. Raising my head occasionally to issue orders to my slaves loving family.

EVERYTHING needs to be picked up from the floor.

Who is going to sweep?

Dusting, it’s important to dust, SOMEBODY has to dust!

The family muttered something about they didn’t know what was worse, my incessant snoring when asleep, or incessant nagging when awake.

One day out from Christmas I’m out of the coma, but there’s still some Christmas presents left to buy, plus the perishable food for chrissie lunch. Husband and I head out to brave the crowds with the other disorganised souls. Children are left instructions for further cleaning.

Turns out the children have learnt well my slash and burn approach to housework. When we get home the house is looking reasonable. As usual, opening any cupboard could result in concussion and the spare room is now unable to be entered, our bedrooms also remain a disgrace. But as long as we keep the guests contained to the central living areas we’ll be alright.

Christmas Day arrives, the kids like their presents, Aunt Dorothy embraces the reuse, recycle, re-gift philosophy, the Bing Lee Chinese dinner set she got free with her washing machine purchase was just sitting in a cupboard, we will actually use it.  The family arrives bearing food. We have seafood, salads, ham and turkey, finished off with pavlova and cheescake.

Here’s what I contributed to the feast.

Cranberry granita champagne cocktail

Roast tomato, goat’s cheese and caramelised onion quiches

Walnut, goat’s cheese and rocket salad. (I added roasted pumpkin & sweet potato to it).

Peach & pistachio salad (it’s from the latest Australian House & Garden but the recipe doesn’t seem to be up on the site).

Hippie Child made her father’s world-famous potato salad (which he stole from our friend Bronwyn), she received a multitude of praise, the handing on of great knowledge between the generations.

A lovely day was had, nobody wandered out of the designated public viewing areas and the food was delicious.

Hope you all enjoyed December 25th, however you spent it, I’m off to eat leftovers.