Looking Nothing At All Like Christmas

You know, hot Christmas is beginning to be a problem.  And I think it's getting worse.

Each year I add more crafty blogs to my link list, and each year I get new ideas from them for Christmas preparation - the cooking, gifts you make rather than buy, and of course the decorations for your home.  I love all that stuff and I come away feeling full of inspiration, but I find that I have nowhere to direct it.  These Christmas-crafty people seem mostly to live in the northern hemisphere, where they make hearty meals and big fruit cakes, cosy soft decorations and generally create warmth and bright to banish the cold and dark outside.

We in Townsville get more than enough warmth and bright from the sun each day, and what we need most of all is to not manufacture any more of it.  This causes a problem with the Christmas decorations.   Our shops, of course, go nuts with the tinsel and the songs about sleigh bells, and there's enough of an ick factor there - hot and flustered car parking, shops overrun with bogans and really too many bodgy tattoos on display - to put me off entirely.  (The other day I had to get Hayden to drive us home from the pool a different way, avoiding the Christmas Carols in the park, because I couldn't look at another insufficiently-dressed inked-up person - man or woman - climbing down from the family 4WD.)  When I get home, I need to be cool and calm.  Instantly.

I did manage a bit of Christmas crafting in the end.  I really liked this idea from Posy Gets Cosy for a quilted table runner ~ quilted, of course, to hold groaning platters of hot roasted meats and big casserole dishes of vegetables.  But instead of using warm Christmassy red and green, I stuck to coolish blues and pistachio.  And I quilted it only very lightly - more to stop condensation rings than scorch marks on the table.  

So, OK, it doesn't look very Christmassy.  Don't think of hot roast turkey.  Think of the cool and delicious glass of golden sauvignon blanc I'm enjoying right now because my Christmas decorating is done.