davidgillon | It's been a packed Christmas

So Christmas Dinner was: garlic mushrooms as a started with salsa for a dip, followed by: chicken, gammon, stuffing, chipolatas, roasties, mash, parsnip, carrot, yorkshire puddings and gravy. Impressively, considering I've never done this before, there were no cooking disasters. I do need to work on portion size, though, since I managed both Christmas Dinner and tea/supper off my initial plateful. I just had the same again for dinner today, and there's at least another portion of vegetables still in the fridge (I did deliberately cook twice as much veg as I thought I needed). And all washed down with Bucks Fizz, or rather Bucks Fizz + added Orange Juice as Asda Bucks Fizz turned out to look particularly anaemic straight from the bottle. There was no room for the cheesecake waiting in the fridge, so seeing as it's supposed to be eaten within 24 hours of defrosting I had cheesecake for breakfast this morning.

And no sooner had I admitted defeat and stowed my leftovers into the fridge yesterday, than I had my lovely neighbours knocking on the door to ask if I would like a complete Christmas dinner. Which was very kind of them, but I had to plead for mercy.

Particularly packed was the care package from my mother and sister. You couldn't have fitted another thing into the box. I counted 17 separately wrapped gifts, several of them containing multiple items when opened, mostly the fairly small novelty items that would usually be shoved into a stocking. Though this year with a covid twist as three of them were wrapped jars of Boots Vitamin D tablets. Given I've already got a bottle of my own I reckon that's me taken care of until the end of 2021. Also included, three boxes of sweets, two pairs of socks, one of them festive slipper socks that I'm currently wearing, a whole bunch of flavoured teas and coffees, and the inevitable body-spray. And because we'd hooked up using Amazon Echo Shows I still got to open presents with my family, which I hadn't realised how much I'd miss.

Right, I'm off to finish off that cheesecake!