My month in numbers December

What a lovely month :) 

60 each of croissants, pain au chocolats and chocolat chauds served at the year 6 café to mark the end of our first term working together.  It was so nice to have such enthusiastic students and they all entered into the spirit of it with real gusto, when I arrived they had decorated the hall and put on the music from Allo Allo!  Everyone ordered in French and served their parents and guests in French as well, at the end of the afternoon they gave me a lovely thank you card they had made themselves and a chocolate Santa that the children and I ate while playing the gingerbread man game on New Year's Day!

46664 - Nelson Mandela's prison number, the press coverage reminded me how inspirational he was.  His imprisonment is one of the first things I can remember being interested in as an adult topic and it is amazing to think his struggle covered the whole of my life!  

8 postcards bought at the national portrait gallery on my grown up day out in London.  It was such a treat to have a chance to do something adult, I walked along the south bank at a reasonable pace, had a delicious lunch with my husband and saw lots of cool Elizabethan pictures.  It is so interestingly to see the faces to go with all the names from the books I have read.

3 beautiful carol concerts attended, a very Wildmoor Christmas was lovely and really special as it was the first time I have been able to go to a Christmas show since M started school.  Year 2 sang Stille Nacht in German perfectly and were the highlight of the show!  W had a great concert where they sang lots of songs with actions and then after 15 mins Hayley said 'that's the end!' And off we went clutching a chocolate coin, my favourite was Christmas pudding!  Then in the last week of term we went back to M's school for a French café, we had croissants and hot chocolate and then they sang vive le vent as part of French Christmas week, très impressionnant et je me suis bien amusée! 

12 bottles of rosé!  For our family Christmas party everyone had to do a 'turn' based on one of our holiday journals from the 80s.  We wrote 'on the first day in west France our family we did see' and performed it before lunch with extra loud singing by W who continues to sing it in the car every few days!  Reading the journal showed how different your memories can be!  One of our favourite stories about that holiday was when we went out in the dinghy not realising what the Atlantic waves were like and nearly took out an elderly French lady being swept back in to the beach at 100kms an hour!  We have been talking about it for years, doesn't get a mention! But the journals did remind me how much we did on those holidays and how lucky we were even if we didn't know it at the time, and all that French! 

One Christmas dinner cooked for 6 guests and all went according to plan thanks to Nigella!  We ended up having a really nice and chilled Christmas, we saw everyone who needed to be seen and had some fab family days at home and out and about.  

The communal count: 

How many Christmas movies is too many?  You can NEVER have too many Christmas movies, we discovered Arthur Christmas this year and Home Alone 4(!).  The highlight of our Christmas viewing was Wreck-it Ralph our new favourite film, we must have seen it a dozen times and W now goes around the house fixing things with his fix-it Felix hammer.

How many Christmas events did you attend?  2 Christmas carol concerts, two end of term French cafés, one lovely 'company do' lunch with my boss/husband! Two family parties with 'shows' and my favourite bit every year children's Christmas mass.

My month in numbers is the brilliant story telling idea of Julie Kirk at http:/notesonpaper.blogspot.uk.