Merry Christmas...yes, I dared to say "Christmas" - how very un-Vancouver of me but stuff it! I know, I'm supposed to say something like, "Happy seasonal Winter Holiday, mid-December solstice-time Festivus type celebration". But hey, I grew up calling it Christmas and I don't ban anyone else from saying Hannukah, Diwali, Ramadam or whatever else they call their own celebrations, so Christmas it is! (Don't get me started on how insane it is here when talking about 'the winter holiday festive season'.....even Christmas cake [she wrote, blaspheming once again] is truly and honestly packaged as 'Seasonal Dark Festive Cake'.... seriously!)
To all my friends and family, I hope you're all having a good time wherever you are and whatever you're doing....which I'm guessing involves digging through the snow for those under the blanket of white stuff that's pretty much paralyzed England for the past few weeks. Funny, 'cos whenever I go to England people generally assume I must spend half the year under 3ft of snow.....not so in Vancouver....we rarely get the white stuff (especially not, it seems, when playing host to the whole World and holding the 2010 Winter Olympics here.....ooops! Bah, details!). So it's about 10C and has been very wet & rainy, as only Vancouver does best, and Santa probably should've just left some wellies and a snorkel!
As it happens, Lorne and I were suitably spoilt over at Vicky and Mark's place yesterday, eating, drinking and laughing too much and simply enjoying a lazy day of indulging in good food, great company and watching the kids play with the packaging their toys came in.
A few more days of this and it'll be time to do it all over again for New Year's! Aaaahhhh, bliss!
I'm enjoying some time off work - using up the pile of overtime hours I've accrued throughout the past 12 months, although I never did get around to many of the Christmas craft projects I anticipated to fill my time. That said I made cards....did a lot of shopping and wrapping.....didn't do any baking.....but am now doing lots of eating.......sounds about right, no?
As a surprise Lorne booked us at Hotel Le Soleil in downtown Vancouver for the night on Dec. 23rd - we had a lovely evening. He took me to dinner at Boneta - a lively and wonderfully high-ceilinged restaurant in the slightly less touristy corner of Gastown (but not quite in the desperately seedy part of town) - the same place he'd booked for my f...f....f.....fortieth birthday dinner. Since he proposed to me on Christmas Eve in 2002, we generally do something special each year and the night at Le Soleil was this year's treat - it was also the hotel we stayed at on our wedding night in 2004. Anyhoooo, to make a long story longer, we went for an after dinner drink at a terrific new basement bar called Guilt & Co. (also in Gastown) - what a great little place! A cellar-like bar with live music (located beneath another great place, Chill Winston's), where the ambience was cosey, very lively, fun, relaxed, captivating and refreshingly non-snooty AND there was thankfully not a single wide-screen TV in sight!!!! (I don't know what it is about Vancouver bars and restaurants these days but they all seem to believe that the more plentiful and massive their collection of wall-to-wall TV screens, the better. You can't get away from it - a nice pub drink has become a loud, 60" plasma-screened rink-side seat at every single hockey game out there - and not just when the Canucks are playing.)
Anyway, I highly recommend the Euro basement bar feel of Guilt & Co. - where else can you just hang with friends, have a drink and play silly boardgames if you so choose - heck it even made Scattegories look entirely hip n' trendy?
Well, it's off to spend Boxing Day evening with friends, more food, more wine and extremely rambunctious kids....and therefore perhaps a little more wine. It's just what the festive holiday mid-winter seasonal festivus-for-the-rest-of-us time is all about.
Merry Christmas!
P.S. Terry, I made Lorne watch last year's Christmas special of The Royles.....so refreshingly, nostalgically British! "One!....doodle-ooop-doop....One! doodle-oop-doop.....One!...."
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