To say thank you for making this year running Tiding of Magpies absolutely amazing, I thought I’d treat you all to a bonus mini-blog with a festive theme. The Goblin and I spent last night making our own Christmas crackers while drinking port, so I’m very much filled with Christmas cheer (and booze; we’ve just made some mulled wine…)
Because it’s our first Christmas as husband and wife (and because we used our annual leave up on the honeymoon and don’t have time to travel to our families!), we’re spending it quietly in our flat, which we’ve gone all-out on decorating.
From a quick scroll through Insta/Twitter/etc, it doesn’t seem like tree tours are much of a thing, so I’ve decided to make them a thing. I absolutely adore Christmas trees; they tell you so much about the people who decorated them. Some are beautiful works of art and some, like ours, are just collections of ornaments that I flung at the tree. I love them all.
Lots of our ornaments are holiday souvenirs or were gifts from family and friends, so they mean a lot to us and tell the story of the last few years…
Honeymoon highlights
We picked up three new ornaments as honeymoon souvenirs, and they have pride of place on our tree:



Glittery gifts
Friends and family, knowing how much I love sparkly things, have also provided many trinkets for our tree over the years.




Assorted oddities
The tree also shares several non-holiday or gift-related memories…




Meanwhile, in the rest of the flat…
That’s all for now, folks. Merry Christmas (or happy time-off-work if you don’t celebrate it!). I’ll leave you with this exceptionally great candle my grandma got us for Christmas this year…