Showing posts with label Christmas cards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas cards. 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...!)