Getting Ready for the Big Day

It is now less than 10 days to go before Christmas Day is upon us. Doesn’t it creep up on you fast?! Luckily, Dori and I finished our gift buying a little while ago before it got too manic in the shopping centres. We have, believe it or not, also already wrapped those gifts and they are currently snuggled safely under the Christmas tree. Well, I say we wrapped them, but it would be slightly more accurate to say that I wrapped my present for Dori and she did all the others!

Before I was married, I would just about be thinking of starting to buy presents at this point in the year, and yes I have even done the stereotypical male thing of rushing round the shops on Christmas Eve trying to get those last few gifts :-) But age, marriage and the sheer dread of battling with thousands of other sharp-elbowed shoppers has led to me being much more organised nowadays. So, the gifts have been bought, wrapped and installed under the tree, and the decorations are up around the Yellow House. Talking of the decorations, for those of you that didn’t see them over at Dori’s blog, here are a few pics to give you an idea of what some of our festive characters look like.

The forecast is for the snow to return tonight and over the weekend, so there is the very real possibility of a White Christmas at the Yellow House this year. I can’t remember the last time we had snow on the ground at Christmas. Santa may need a sleigh for real next week!

Yellow House Merchandise

As I mentioned in an earlier post, when we were visiting family and friends over in the States at Thanksgiving we handed out some homemade gifts and cards. You have already seen some pictures of the cards we made, and I thought now would be an appropriate time to share some photos of the gifts too. I say appropriate because the gifts were all calendars, and I am sure that you have all been hanging up new calendars this last week – or wondering when and where you will be getting one for this New Year!

These calendars weren’t entirely homemade as such, but all the photos were our own, as were some of the backgrounds, and we laid out each page of the calendars to our own design too. We then got them printed up by a company in Belgium. We made calendars to two different designs – one as a wall calendar and the other as a desk calendar.

Here are the pictures of the pages of the wall calendar.

And here are the pages of the smaller desk calendar.

                   

        

        

         

The lighting wasn’t the best when we took the photos of the pages and some are a little blurry – but you will get the idea!

We very much enjoyed putting the calendars together and we are hoping to take some more photographs during this coming year that we can use for more calendars for 2011. All being well, those will then be available to buy from our blogs sometime in the autumn. Unfortunately we cannot sell the ones for this year because we don’t have the image rights for some of the places that we have photographed.

Now, I have to go and plan some photographic expeditions with Dori !! .