Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts

Saturday, 21 December 2024

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 


Wishing you all the very best for the season! This picture was on the front of our Christmas card, It was taken at the Luttrell Arms Hotel in the autumn.

The photo at the very end of this post was inside our card, It was taken in our own garden.

This year our chosen charity in lieu of buying commercial cards is MDS UK - the support group for the condition that Mr Bufo has been diagnosed with.


Each year, and every year, I thank Susan Cooper for this poem:

The Shortest Day – Susan Cooper
So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen,
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing, behind us — listen!
All the long echoes sing the same delight
This shortest day
As promise wakens in the sleeping land.
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends, and hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year, and every year.
Welcome Yule!





Thursday, 14 December 2023

Season's Greetings

 It's time ...



To wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

This year our charity in lieu of sending commercial cards (we send a few we've printed out with this picture on) is Macmillan Cancer Support. The photo was taken by Mr Bufo in the Capability Brown Chapel at Compton Verney this year.

Tuesday, 6 December 2022

Christmas is coming ...


We've sent the few cards we do - or those going by post, anyway, in the hope they will arrive before or despite the impending strikes. This year our chosen charity in lieu of buying commercial cards is Southampton Hospitals Intensive Care Unit.

We've sent, or organised, such presents as we give - not many, and mostly cash to the under-eighteens.

Festive food is on order, and the non-perishables already to hand will be taken tomorrow to where we are spending Christmas so there is less to take on 23 December when we transfer ourselves there for the holiday.

So here are two of the pictures from this year's card. The third was from part of an exhibition and whilst I'm sure it's fine sending to the few friends who get a printed card, I don't feel it would be right to put it on the internet, even though the photo is Mr Bufo's - as are these - and the notice in the gallery said photography was allowed. As always we have chosen only from pictures taken during this year.

The stone 'face' is on the beach at Porlock Weir, and caught our fancy on our post-lunch stroll in the spring.

Those who know Cleeve Abbey will recognise the inspiration for this early 20th century carved pew-end in Old Cleeve church. The mandorla containing the Virgin Mary and Christ-Child, and the motto 'Porta patens esto nulli claudaris honesto' - loosely translated by Elsie J Oxenham as 'Gate open be to honest folk all free' - appear high above the entrance arch of the early 16th-century Abbey Gatehouse. 

So all that remains is to wish everyone reading this the very best of the season, and may next year bring everyone, if not what they wish for, what will be right for them.

(The goose might be getting fat, but we're not having one this year...!)

Friday, 10 December 2021

Season's Greetings

 And so the time comes round again for our 'Christmas card'.



As in previous years, we haven't send many actual cards, and those we have are 'home made' with this image on the front, taken by Mr Bufo in the garden, and the Florence Nightingale window that was installed in Romsey Abbey earlier this year.





Our chosen charity this time is Maggie's. We always donate to something worthwhile, as we don't spend money on actual cards.

We wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and the very best year possible in 2022!



Friday, 18 December 2020

Season's Greetings

 


We had difficulty this year in keeping to our self-imposed rule of only using a photo we had taken in the current year for our Christmas card. But we decided the stars on this allium were suitable for the front, and then the inside picture is the central part of a blanket I am in the process of crocheting. Our chosen charity this year in lieu of sending commercial cards is Southampton Hospitals Charity, Intensive Care Unit.


We wish all our friends the very best Christmas possible in this strange year, and hope that 2021 will be a better one for everybody. 



Monday, 16 December 2019

Seasonal Greetings!



And so we come to the one post I do manage to make every year! Here are the pictures from our home-made Christmas card. We don't send many actual cards out, so chances are you won't have had one - please accept this greeting instead. Our donation in lieu of buying commercial cards this year is to Sands - the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity.

The main picture above is the roof of the Hotel Alliance Couvent des Minimes, which we took in February with the New Year, or St Sylvestre, balloons still up in the glass roof. We shall be there again for Christmas this year.

The eye is in Bristol - at the bottom, appropriately, of Christmas Steps. Mr Bufo found it when he was exploring while I was at the Diana Wynne Jones conference in August. Apparently this was once the window of a pub where they had to watch out for the Press Gang. Now blocked, the mural in its place is a reminder of the bad old days.



We send you all every good wish for a Happy Christmas 
and a Good New Year! 


Wednesday, 12 December 2018

Season's Greetings


Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, Happy New Year and Happy Holidays for those who have other festivals to celebrate at or around the Solstice. 

Apologies for the dearth of posts since the spring. We've had a funny year, health-wise, but now beginning to feel a bit more like doing things again. This photo was taken by Mr Bufo on the Canal de Bourgogne in May. As usual we have made a donation - this year to Macmillan Cancer Support - in lieu of sending commercial Christmas cards.

Tuesday, 19 December 2017

Christmas and New Year Greetings!



To wish everyone a very Merry Christmas 
and a Happy New Year 

The photo was taken in the Cristallerie Lehrer in Garrebourg on the Rhine-Marne Canal last May. They make thousands of baubles, all hand-blown - each year for the Christmas market. The barge we were on - with us on it! -  featured in the Timothy West/Prunella Scales programme where they did the same canal in the opposite direction. For a fleeting second you can even see Mr Bufo among the people waving on the foredeck. I was inside knitting!

(I note with horror that I haven't posted anything since last April, and hope to do better next year!)

Tuesday, 20 December 2016

To wish you...

...A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Columns in St Andrew's Cathedral, Bordeaux

Hoping you are all able to forget the troubles of the world for at least a short time and to celebrate the holiday with those you love.

Wishing Joy to the World in 2017 - however unlikely that looks from this end of 2016 ...

...and finally, a little tease - some of you know where this picture is, more will be revealed in my first post of next year ...


Monday, 22 December 2014

All Good Wishes for Christmas and the New Year



I have been very remiss this year and not posted anything like as often as I should have - I will try to be a better girl next year. But we will be very busy [not in the Chalet School sense!] planning TMOH's 'Big Birthday' celebration for next August, so I don't know whether this will get fitted in. I have been busy knitting - according to the gadget on Ravelry, nearly 7 miles of yarn have gone through my fingers this year. 






You've seen the cardigan, jumper and cats already, but two blankets and most of the squares for another one have also been completed, and a goldfish called Solon [you can see some of the squares for the current blanket behind him].


All good wishes to everyone for Christmas 2014 and New Year 2015

Tuesday, 24 December 2013

Season's Greetings

Wishing everyone a 
Very Merry Christmas 
and a 
Healthy and Prosperous 
New Year 2014

(c) P Hubbard 2013