It's Beginning to Look a lot like Christmas

Hubbie said he wanted to go to the mountain house over the weekend.

I’m no great fan of mountain houses. It’s a major migration, as far as I am concerned. You have to haul up an incredible amount of junk with you, because you cannot really remember anymore whether you have sugar up there, or matches, or salt, or water, or clean sheets and towels, and so you drag it all up, and once up there, you realize you were thinking exactly the same last time, the time before, and so you end up with an obnoxious amount of sugar and salt and the rest. You forgot the wine of course, and the onions, and the coffee, so you end up having to go to the local supermarket anyways. Who’s going to feed the cats and the birds while you’re gone, and what dog comes along and what dog stays behind? Your children pack for 16 days, instead of a two day weekend, it doesn’t all fit in the car, the gas bottle is always empty once you get there (we cook on bottled gas in Lebanon, yes yes). Once there, you spent the entire Saturday cleaning the house, and Sunday you spent packing for the return trip to Beirut. And just when you are about to leave, the house has finally warmed up enough to sit in the living room without wearing a ski jacket.

But heck, the teenager (soon to be adult) announced he was not joining us, and so it would be just us and our daughter, and so I got suckered into this romantic getaway.

Then the old aunt decided she would join us.

So the housekeeper wanted to come along.

The old aunt had a friend over from Tripoli, and invited her too.

Then a friend of mine called with a request, she had a sudden work engagement; could her daughter sleep over at our house?

And finally my SIL had a medical emergency in the family, and along came two more children.

And so our romantic group of three became a troupe of nine.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas; "marshemellows (chestnuts) roasting on an (open) fire"

That’s much better. Mountain houses are more fun when there’s life in the place. And in the evening we roasted marshmallows on the fire. It is beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

I'll be spending this Christmas not in the mountains, but on the flat lands of the Netherlands. Wishing you all a Merry Christmas from there.