❄❄ Let It Snow ❄❄ :: Christmas 2012 Chatter Thread

FeistyFidget

You guys have tempted me to go into town today. I am fortunate enough to live a five minute walk from our huge high street and as I have to go in and post some work related faff, I may as well pop in and spend my hard earned cash in the 99p store We also have a poundland, but in all honesty I'm not keen - it's tiny, most of the things are over-priced and it just isnt a patch on our huge 99p store!

I am mainly after some basic ice cube trays to make my bath fizzies in (Martha Stewart recipe) but I am sure I will end up over, spending and driving DH mad Luckily, we have just changed our spare room into my office as I mainly work from home, so I can hide it all in there!

DH is complaining about the very strong smell of onions wafting about the house Sometimes it is difficult living with a Grinch during the festive season!

weeclick

Got to work early this morning and got very excited when I saw suppliers building the wooden stalls (remind me of log cabins) in the town centre ready for the christmas market which is here from 17th CANNOT wait. Favourite part of christmas is walking around the market with a baileys hot chocolate in one hand and all wrapped up ready for winter, its even better when it snows!!

Got 1 slab done yesterday, bit of experimenting with chocolate, tried mr Ts own as lidls over here apparently is a different company to lidls in England and so different offers apply, their chocolate works out 59p a bar and I need to make quite a few of these! Ive decided tescos white chocolate is lovely but will need an extra bar per slab as its quite thin and will use lidls milk chocolate.

Got more chocolate spoons done and 4 presents wrapped. Tried the coins idea from someone in this thread and it looks brill so thanks!! Defo better than bows!!

keelykat

madrhino wrote: »

I'm sure I saw some Christmas tree moulds in the 99p shop the other day. At least I think it was the 99p shop I saw them in

I got my tree and gingerbread men shaped moulds from 'Poundworld'

keely.

cornishorchid

just got home afyer being away on business for the last 4 days...i left at 402 pages..not looking forward to refreshing it!!!

normandleigh

need some help, my baby girl (7months next week) has decided that she isnt going to wait till after christmas to walk and has started standing up and walking around the furniture :eek::eek: so i need a cheapish fibre optic tree about 5ft so it can stand on my sideboard so my little monkey cant reach it. ideally i would like one that flashes different colours. cant afford too much any ideas where i can get a nice one?
TIA xx

kez_s

caitlyn22 wrote: »

Very longtime lurker coming out of the Christmas Closet here - had to when I saw this post!! Try E*ay jenjenn - the Christmas Pickle is actually a traditional German ornament - they hang little (and big!) glass ones on trees and children have to find them!

Anyway, I have read this from page one but never really joined in - I'm noted for my Christmas obsession, not sure where it comes from, though my mum and dad always tried to give us a nice Christmas, in spite of how lousy they were at parenting the rest of the year! My dad died a few years ago and I miss him terribly, and my mum has early onset dementia and this will be the second Christmas we've left her to spend it at home - she's in a care home with just a few other ladies and they all have Christmas dinner together. Unfortunately she doesn't know us anymore and gets very unsettled if we try to get her to leave the house. She seems happy though and that's the most important thing. So there's just me and my sister now and our own little families so we try to make it special for each other.

My dad used to start buying Christmas cake and mince pies as soon as they appeared in the shops joking that he had to 'test' as many as possible! For pretty much all of December, he would come in from work (he worked away during the week, only home for weekends) and his first words would be "Has he been yet?" (in reference to Santa!) I believed in Santa for so long because of my parents - one of the things they did to make it seem more real was wrap all of my presents 'from' Santa in that really cheap, thin wrapping paper and the presents from them in different stuff. Not only was this quite MSE of them, they told us it was because Santa had to use cheaper paper because he had so many presents to give. It might not work on kids now but this was an utterly convincing argument for me at that age!! My mum used to make us stockings and would always sit and watch us unwrap anything, even the tiny little things she'd wrapped, as she would love to see our reactions. I remember doing Christmas activities with her, simple things like colouring in, and without fail, she'd hang whatever decorations we made on the tree - however awful they were!

Anyway, it might be silly but I just wanted to share this with you all because so many of you seem to be going to lots of effort to make Christmas special for your own children and I wanted to let you know how important this is. It's the memories I have of my parents that make me love Christmas. It's not the big presents that matter or how much money you spend, but rather the tiny details and traditions that will stay with your children forever.

What wonderful memories you have, thank you for sharing them, I have a huge lump in my throat after reading it. It must be really difficult to see your Mum and her not know you anymore, my Nan has dementia and it's getting worse by the week, her long term memory is fantastic and she can talk for hours about her childhood, my late Grandad, etc., but if you talk to her about something that happened an hour ago, she can't remember it, eventually it too is going to hit the stage where she won't know who I am or if she does, she might not know me at the age I am now, this I am really struggling with as I've always been so close to my Nan.

On the Christmas front I can't believe Christmas Eve is 6 weeks today! One minute it seemed ages away and now it's just around the corner, we've been away for a fantastic few days and after a few manic weeks I intend to hit everything Christmassy with a bang! I'm way ahead compared but I'm really not too confident I'll have everything done by the beg of Dec which is my goal!

A couple of questions if anyone can help, has anyone who has ordered from the M&S Christmas food to order received a £6.99 ecard? I have but I'm not sure if it's legit as you were supposed to receive a voucher for wine or chocolates to collect at the same time as your order? This appears to be for anything online or instore, I've not downloaded it yet as when I did a search I found a post that says it's a scam and contains a virus? Thought I'd check here first before I contact M&S.

Also with regards to the coke lorry, for the first time this year we have a choice of two places we can see it, it's never in our area normally and I've been crazy about the coke ad for years so want to go, but it doesn't say what time it's there till? On both occasions it arrives at 11am, and the day it's in Bournemouth we are going to the panto in the evening so wondered if both could be combined or should I go on the other date if it's only there for a couple of hours, I don't mind going to the other but the place it's at is a nightmare to park at the best of times and I've no idea how it's even going to fit into the car park they've suggested so it could be a bit crazy down there!

Any info would be appreciated!

kez_s

normandleigh wrote: »

need some help, my baby girl (7months next week) has decided that she isnt going to wait till after christmas to walk and has started standing up and walking around the furniture :eek::eek: so i need a cheapish fibre optic tree about 5ft so it can stand on my sideboard so my little monkey cant reach it. ideally i would like one that flashes different colours. cant afford too much any ideas where i can get a nice one?
TIA xx

Not sure on the tree front but what I use to do with my kids when they were at this stage was put some musical toys under the tree so they always went for these instead of the tree itself, the only pain was they were constantly setting them all off and driving me nuts... but the tree always remained upright and intact! Only trouble is now they've become part of tradition and the kids, now 5 & 7, still drive me crazy with them but they won't let me keep in the box!

prem0132

Kelly7 wrote: »

Hello fellow Christmas fans!

My Christmas spirit has been sky high the past few days. Between two shopping trips and all the Christmas adverts on tv, it really is starting to look a lot like Christmas.

Managed to get the Christmas iPhone covers from poundland, also got the Christmas pudding and Santa bin bags. My friend just shook her head as I danced about with excitement at finding them.

I'm on the look out for Christmas moulds to make Chocs with. I've checked b&m, home bargains, wilkinsons, poundland but had no luck. Hoping I'll find some eventually!

Going to make up my retro sweetie boxes today and print the labels for my snowman soup, pots of gold and reindeer/snowman poop. If I can work out how to I will post pics later

Hi

I tend to use christmas cookie cutters I have with baking paper underneath, hold them down as you pour chocolate in and you can trim them afterwards if need be or I have even used a knife in water to smooth the sides. Xx

will-be-debt-free

aliaslotte wrote: »

Hello all!

I'm watching a Are You Being Served xmas special on Y*uTube atm lol. I've grouped a few different xmas specials into a playlist, including the wonderful 2.4 Children episodes. Makes for a nice festive watch.

I've been experimenting a bit with my wrapping paper.

Not sure about the kraft paper thus far. It is good quality and I do like it, but I'm not sure how I could dress it up. I'm thinking I might use little chocolate santas at some point [once I've decided on a ribbon type]. We'll see.




I really like the silver and black paper though. That was £1.47 a roll from Mr T. Instead of bows, which always seem to fall off or get squished, I'm using chocolate coins. I've just stacked them [three per present]. I think they look alright. And, they were reasonably priced. I've got enough coins for 24 presents [plus spare 'big' coins - around 9 spares] for £2.





I still have another roll to use and some tags I found that I think work with it [despite not matching].



I love wrapping presents.

you are sooo talented, i admit i am one of the xmas eve wrappers and they always look a mess, am nearly done shopping so will make an effort to wrap nicely this year - may stuggle witht he 2 hampers i have to do - may need to watch some you tube tutorials!!!

ReformedShopaholic

Morning all,
popped into town today, Picked up our stockings.
Also bought some red thread to sew our names on them(hopefully this will go well as I am not a sewing person)

Picked up some red material in Boyes for a £1 that has glitter snowflakes on, they also had white material with glitter snowflakes. The material is see through and 29 inches x 29 inches. Thought I might make some cloth place mats for the table but not so sure about that now as they will be very thin.
Also in Boyes I saw a red storage box that is flat packed, it has white snowflakes and Merry Christmas written in white for £7.99 looks a good size, sorry didn't get measurements.
But I did get a photo of these boxes