QUESTIONS

• Do you enjoy receiving Christmas cards through snail mail? 

Yes, I do although I get very few these days as most people don’t seem to send cards preferring an electronic greeting. Of course, I don’t send as many as I used to either and this year, due to moving I’ve only posted one as I generally hand-delivered my cards to local friends. There are some lovely e-cards but you can’t sit them on the mantelpiece and look at them so I miss the real ones.

• Do you like the taste and/or smell of peppermint?

Yes, although I don’t associate it with Christmas so much. We always have mints in the car when we are on a road trip and I just remembered that we forgot to eat our box of After Dinner Mints over the weekend.

• What is your least favourite holiday side dish?

As we cook our own Christmas meal, and for the past few years it has just been the two of us, we only cook things we like so I can’t say I really have a least favourite dish. When we lived in South Australia we usually had a holiday meal with David’s family and that tended to be more Aussie style with seafood and salads as well as roast meat rather than the British style meal that I cook. However, I enjoyed that just as much and the only thing I would probably avoid was oysters if they were on the menu or lobster because shellfish are messy and hard work to dismember. I always looked forward to prawns, however.

• What is the coolest (best) gift you ever gave someone?

I don’t think that is for me to say. You would have to ask the recipients. I try to buy gifts that I know the recipient will really like. It’s easy for Naomi and me because we know each other’s likes and dislikes and what each other collects. When the nieces and nephew were younger it was fun to buy them gifts and although I could never be sure I had come up with something they would really like I did have some successes with just the right little girls dress, a copy of “Little Women” that went down particularly well and cricket related gifts for a sporty nephew. I think Naomi would say her easel was one of her favourite presents and she loved the vintage teddy bear I got her this year. (We already exchanged gifts).

Bonus question because I thought it was nifty:   What is a Christmas song that makes you cringe?   (Please insert the word “Holiday” for Christmas if Christmas isn’t your thing or bothers you or something)

I won’t say it’s the worst but “Last Christmas” by Wham was not a favourite.