Christmas

Standards

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

I went delivering Christmas cards the other day – not something I usually do but it was combined with a dog walk, and that is something I have to do, come rain or shine.

This was rain.

I dropped one off at a friend’s.

Jess and I were what could charitably be described as more than bedraggled. ‘Look like you have been pulled through a wet hedge backwards,’ as my grandmother would have said.

My friend however answered the door in a glamorous black jumper, nicely made up, hair looking good, jewellery properly accessorised.

‘Well it is Christmas and it’s worth making an effort,’ she said.

Likewise, I got reprimanded by another friend for having no, not one, Christmas decoration in the house – at least not one visible from the outside ( and, dear reader, there was indeed not one inside.)

So I went up in the loft, went into the garden and got a bit of ivy, and scattered it along with a carrier bag’s worth of decorations around the house.

( Usually, the reprimanding friend decorates our house for our annual Winter Lunch but not this year….)

But, I can’t say that I went home and blowed dried my hair or put on anything glam – brushing the mud off my jeans was as far as that went.

This lockdown, unlike the previous two, has come as a bit of a depressing surprise. 

For those of us with charmed and easy lives (and I do know that is not true of many people), the first lockdown was all gardening, chatting with neighbours over the fence, organising NHS headband-makers, cooking for the village, and zooms.

November was predicted, and to be honest, didn’t feel much like a lockdown as the traffic was ‘roaring’ round the lanes as people nipped into Waitrose for an ‘essential’ or two, fewer zooms, not as scary, not as sociable……

This one has dark mornings and evenings, bad weather, a threat of a more contagious virus, and it is seriously muddy underfoot.

And there is the battle between ‘why bother’ and ‘keeping up some standards’.

As I spent part of this morning doing the ironing, there was a bit of me thinking why do I need an ironed white shirt when I get up every morning put on those (sometimes brushed) jeans, a t-shirt and a jumper to walk the dog. 

Somehow, I can’t bring myself to wear the white shirt, have to wash and iron it again – indeed there are a lot of clothes in my wardrobe that haven’t, and aren’t likely to, be worn in the foreseeable future.

But being an Aspinall, genetic heritage from my mother and grandmother, cooking carries on.

So, to Christmas lunch.

I asked a shooting villager for a brace of pheasants and in return made him and his family and steak and kidney pie.

In the end he gave me a brace of partridge which I failed to cook properly.

So, we had a (nearly) vegetarian Christmas lunch but ,I would like to point out, sauté potatoes, creamed spinach with nutmeg, sprouts with bacon, cider gravy – so some standards don’t slip in this household.

Phones and Faff

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I do realise that you, dear reader, may wince at the mention of Christmas but for those of us beavering away at the retail of second-hand books, things need to be started on that front.

For some years, I have been telling you about how we start stockpiling books in exceptionally good condition to boost our Christmas trade and that means lots of crates around the upstairs room with notes on them saying they need to be left well alone until I decide we need to start putting them out.

Well, last week, another volunteer and I decided we needed to clear some space to slot empty, waiting crates into.

The shop manager is nothing if not a man to throw anything away or deal with anything today when several months hence might do just as well.

(I have this feeling that if you dig hard enough under bottom shelves, behind boxes, at the back of etc etc you could easily find a mummified body of an apparently unmissed volunteer.)

However, what we found most of during this clear out, was lots and lots of mobile phones. 

People can, and apparently do often, donate old mobile phones and Oxfam has some system of getting them re-used or their innards taken out, or whatever.

But to do that they need to be sent somewhere. Only the manager knows where, and he had clearly decided that there was no rush. 

There were about three carrier bags and a sizeable box of them.

So, we pulled them out of their dark corner – where there was also a hoover which to the best of my knowledge has not be employed for the past say two or three years, a 1960s box for carrying records which had been stashed with out of date cameras and lenses…..

Anyway, we put the phones into crates and put them in the other room, not too far from the kettle, so they couldn’t be ignored.

Next time I went in, the manager had put them all into cardboard boxes, neatly labelled as mobile phones for re-cycling and put them back where they were before!

And they will probably be there next Christmas.

In that clear out/up, I also found a box of Coalport houses – I had checked them and priced them and put them back in the box and promptly forgotten about them – though I do remember thinking they would work on a Christmas table, so all is not lost.

This time of year also means the annual ritual of crab apple jelly.

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I am sure I have said before that what was once a nod towards earth mother meets Sussex housewife, lost much of its charm on the basis it is a faff to make and we don’t eat it/remember to give it away over the year, and so is now in a stash in the cellar.

Anyway, this year we have, for the first time, a quince harvest and if anything quince jelly is even more of a faff, but it has the advantages novelty and you can make membrillo from the left over pulp.

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So, I put a notice in the village shop window offering our crab apples to any takers and this afternoon, as I sit writing this, a family are doing their best to clear the tree and are raking up the windfalls in the process.

Excellent.

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Gold Stars

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So, there I was telling you all about how we were preparing for Christmas in the Oxfam bookshop, when little did I know that a really big cheese in Oxfam shops was planning a (nearly) night before Christmas visit.

He is a nice man and lives relatively locally so this should have just been taken in our stride – but I wanted to have gold stars raining down on us.

I dragooned other volunteers into extra tasks, fretted and chivvied and tidied and organised, and I went into the shop every day in the run up – ignoring my own plans to approach my own Christmas with a zen-like calm and to be festively organised for the rather extensive flow of family and friends.

Making sure the table was all set up and rather lovely – though I say it myself and (metaphorically) patting down my apron and brushing back a lock from my sweaty brow, I awaited his arrival.

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He was running late. He had to go back to Oxford to sign something.

I titivated – which in Oxfam bookshop terms, means re-arranged front-facing books, got all the craft section in order of hobby – knitting, sewing, teddy bear making, ancient Chinese calligraphy, etc.

Biography was in alphabetical order of subject, literature was actually literature and no stray copy of Jeffrey Archer was lurking there, all the books which had been donated were sorted, children’s books were all of excellent quality and looked enticing etc etc.

Yes, of course, I had made sure all this was already done….but I needed to keep busy.

I had planned to walk him around what we had been doing behind the scenes to make sure our Christmas sales were a success, and then hand him over to the till – he wanted to spend time in the shop – with a pre-primed lovely volunteer.

But he was late and then when he did arrive, he had phone calls he had to make.

I forced him to admire the table, made him a cup of tea and gave him a delicious pastry made by our Syrian refugee volunteer, and left.

He made his calls.

Then he left – he never made it to the till or to admire just how well organised and lovely the shop looked.

I was just a little deflated.

He did say he would come and volunteer for another shift – I just hope it is not a surprise visit on a wet Wednesday when I have been a little less than enthusiastic about getting everything looking just tickety-boo – I want those gold stars.