Sunday Thoughts

A special Sunday Thoughts as it’s St. Stephen’s Day, Boxing Day, or St. Stephensessess Day. However you prefer to say it. I remember our first St. Stephen’s Day in Ireland in 1991, there was a knock on the door and a group of ‘wren boys’ were there. There’s an interesting article here to tell you more about the tradition of the wren boys.

I know Christmas is a strange time for some people, and I know this year in particular there are a lot of people ill. Just a quick glance at my twitter feeds shows about people isolating or recovering. I’m not going to dwell on it, I just want to say I’m thinking of them.

We had a lovely day, lots of cooking, lots of eating, and lots of relaxing. Lucy came down to spend the day with us, which was great, she’s also brilliant in the kitchen and makes an amazing sprout gratin, I think it was my favourite part of the dinner. We also had a Vegan plant based roast from Dunnes, which was the best version of a shop bought vegan/vegetarian roast I’ve tasted so far. Dunnes have really upped their game as far as meat free dishes are concerned, they seem to have more choice than some of the other supermarkets.

We also had turkey and ham, and all the trimmings. I’ve added a pic of my dinner in case you want to see it 🙂 There was an issue with the turkey (there’s always an issue about the turkey), I ended up with two. I bought a small frozen one (because himself kept going on about a full turkey) and then I worried it wouldn’t thaw in time so I bought a fresh turkey breast (which was bigger than the whole turkey). There was then the dilemma of trying to thaw out the turkey in time, I was getting so obsessed I even had a dream about the turkey. There was also a last minute dash on Christmas Eve by Andy in the Zoe electric car (with only a few miles of range) to buy a turkey thermometer – but that’s a whole other story.

I got some fantastic presents, I had to laugh as Lucy and Jono got me a bird feeder which looked just like me 😀 So of course we had to take a photo.

We were delighted to have Puggly with us, he was diagnosed with a tumour in July and he’s on medication and not in any pain. We thought we were going to lose him then, so to have him here was so wonderful. A Christmas present in itself.