Category: Personal

Compared to the children, the dog is Not So Impressed by the deep snowfall we've just received. To be fair, it's basically up to get armpits!

(leg-pits? I don't know what the right word is for a canine!)

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A French Bulldog up to the top of her legs in deep snow.

I'm staying in a lodge in the Yorkshire Dales National Park to celebrate the eldest kid's birthday and we've just received a huge dump of snow, overnight. What was grass is now a thick white carpet of fresh powder. Sounds like a great birthday present for an excited kid I can just hear beginning to wake up...

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Snow- covered meadow, uh a fence running through it, with snowy winter woods beyond.

Our family tradition on New Year's Day is to go to the Rollright Stones. Legend has it that you can't count the standing stones and get the same answer twice.

This year the younger child counted 37, the elder 67... so wide a difference that you can see how one might ascribe a mystical reason!

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A stone circle in the rain. Some people (and a dog) are walking around it.

This evening I used leftover cocktail sausages to make teeny-tiny toads-in-the-hole (my kids say they should be called frogs-in-the-dip).

It worked out pretty well.

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A pyramid of four bite-sized toads-in-the-hole alongside chive mash and carrots, smothered in gravy, on a plate.

Micro-recipe:

1. Bake cocktail sausages (or veggie sausages, pictured) until barely done.
2. Meanwhile, make a batter (per every 6 sausages: use 50ml milk, 50g plain flour, 1 egg, pinch of salt).
3. Remove sausages from oven, then turn up to 220C.
4. Put a teaspoon of a high-temperature oil (e.g. vegetable, sunflower) into each pit of a cake/muffin tin, return to oven until almost at smoke point.
5. Add a sausage or two to each pit and return to the oven for a couple of minutes to come back up to temperature.
6. Add batter to each pit. It ought to sizzle when it hits the oil, if it's hot enough. Return to the oven.
7. Remove when puffed-up and crisp. Serve with gravy and your favourite comfort food accompaniments.

Got the ratio of chipolatas to bacon wrong for your Christmas pigs-in-blankets and now have more cocktail sausages than you know what to do with? No, just me?

Here's my planned solution, anyway - teeny tiny toads-in-the-hole! (Toad-in-the-holes?) Let's see how it works out...

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Cupcake-sized Yorkshire pudding batter cups, each with a cocktail sausage or two inside, being inserted into an oven.

The fifth day of Christmas, and perhaps my last opportunity of the season to justify having trifle... for breakfast.

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Dan, standing on a kitchen, holds a large bowl partially filled with trifle.

On a midnight train back from a London theatre trip, somehow the 8-year-old is still awake (and reading comics to me!); the 10-year-old is understandably wiped-out.

A fun night out though!

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Dan sits on a train alongside a boy and a sleeping girl.

Our family Christmas Eve tradition, which we absolutely stole from Icelandic traditions (cultural appropriation? I'm not sure...) via some newspaper article we saw years ago, is a book exchange.

verybody gives each other person a book,then we sit around and read until people retire to bed (first the kids, then - eventually - the adults).

We love it.

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Dan sits by firelight reading a red-spined book.

Christmas Jumper Day at school, and I'm continuing my never-ending effort never to rest on my laurels, proving myself time and again worthy of my title of Most Embarrassing Parent.

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Three people in a decorated hallway, wearing Christmas jumpers and headgear. Dan, in the centre, is wearing a jumper designed to make him look like a tiny elf, and a matching hat. To his right, a girl wears a jumper showing Rudolf, and a pair of spring-mounted reindeer deely-boppers. To his left, a boy with his eyes closed throws a thumbs-up: he's wearing a jumper with a pixel-art picture of Santa, and a wooly Santa hat.

At first I thought "Christmas post" had something to do with letters and parcels, but then I found one in the wild.

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Finger post footpath sign adorned with a toy snowman and wrapped in a spiral of red and silver tinsel.

Today I put 550 Christmas cards into envelopes, sealed them, put address labels on them, and stamped them.

Because these were the "lick and stick" kind of envelopes rather than a self-sealing variety, I've been unable to taste anything except glue ever since.

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Cardboard box containing many hundreds of sealed Christmas-card-sized envelopes.