Christmas has now passed and January has come rushing at us thick and fast, but it was a marvellous first Christmas in our new home. There were day visits northward to visit family in Caithness, and there was a long-weekend visit from family from England and Spain. But Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day we spent at home (or in the local area), just us. All in all, it was pretty much perfect.
The family visit, hosting a houseful, was utter chaos, but exactly what we wanted when we bought the house. There were three families under one roof (totalling four cousins), with grandparents staying in a nearby hotel. The layout downstairs worked really well, with the large kitchen and the sitting room and our snug leading off it (one day, there will also be a dining room leading from the kitchen – but at the moment, that is full of boxes). I’ve always been a firm believer that the kitchen is the heart of the home, and it felt like it, even as it is right now with make-shift worktops and a mish-mash of furniture. Euan finished off the bar for the sitting room (a slim strip of oak on tall black legs), and we used it in the kitchen for extra worktop-height space. We moved the smaller table (what was once, many moons and two or three houses ago, my desk) into the sitting room for the kids, and it has been so handy there that we haven’t bothered rearranging everything back again yet.
There were some things we couldn’t predict until we tried out having so many people in the house. Having an airbed in the guest room (in addition to the double bed) for our niece didn’t work too well, so after the first night we pushed the two settees together in the sitting room and she and Auri had a lot of fun sleeping there (there was absolutely nothing wrong with Auri’s bed, but sharing the settee with her cousin was understandably deemed much more fun).
The day after the family left, there was a significant snowfall, followed in the early-ish hours by a deluge of rain, resulting in a leak in the sitting room. We’d only fixed the previous one in early autumn, but I think the recent storms must have loosened another tile. Apart from that, though, the house survived the season unscathed, a host to happy memories being made.
On New Year’s Day, there was a display of the Merry Dancers and the sky was alive with stars. We took some photos outside from the back garden, some a tad blurry because of the night setting, our home a warm beacon of light.
