Lovely Yule - Plus, Alas, Bleurgh Part 3

We had a lovely day yesterday celebrating Yule with Hazel, Romy and Tansy. Emily and Romy made Mother Winter's Wish Bread and put wishes inside the dough with dried fruit. They also created symbolic outfits for God and Goddess wooden figures and listened to some Yule stories. The girls also got crafty with some yule logs cut from one of our eucalyptus trees, drilling into them and attaching holly from the garden, fir cones, wooden beads and so on. Finally, we created a little "cave" in the garden from some long twigs, gaps filled in with holly and evergreen bits. The God and Goddess figures went inside and we lit four candles at the entrance, which we left burning through the night to keep the goddess company as she prepared to rebirth the sun. It was very pretty in the dark. Emily and I had lots of fun and we hope our guests did too :-)



Jon was out all day getting the Christmas food shopping and having a good old root around for some last minute pressies too. He came back chuffed with his finds, as indeed were we, so that was all good too.

Less good was that by 7pm, Emily had a high fever. She'd started having a sore throat around lunch time, but had managed to shrug it off until we'd finished our yule bits and bobs. It really hit her quite hard yesterday evening, though. Poor love had a bright red throat, a blotchy face and a very high temperature and was aching everywhere. She was also violently sick half way up the bathroom wall having run to get to the toilet but not quite made it in time :-(( She had an extremely fitful night's sleep and was utterly miserable.

Unfortunately, we had to cancel Emily's friend Maisie coming round for the day today, as she just isn't up to it. Emily's feeling slightly better at the moment, as she and various combinations of me and Daddy have spent all day snuggled up on the settee watching telly. We've all just watched the first half of the Hogfather DVD which brought lots of smiles as she'd been dying to watch the DVD having seen it on Sky when it was first shown last year.

Meanwhile I'm still not that much better either. Thought I was going to be OK for yule yesterday and I was alright in the morning, but felt progressively worse as the wore on, and have now developed a hacking and quite painful cough, even though the sinus pain has gone.

Fingers crossed now that Emily will continue to get better and will have shrugged off this latest lurgy before Christmas. And that mine will finally go away. And that Jon won't develop either mine, Emily's or anyone else's. And that Emily and I won't give one another the other's if we haven't already got various versions of each other's to start with. Who knows. It's a bit like a hospital ward here at the moment!