So opening up the post this morning, this was one of the Christmas Cards…
Can’t think why they chose this particular card…
Nor made the added comment in biro…
Nope…
No, not at all… 😀
Christmas Card
Tag Archives: Christmas
The Feast of the Pharaohs
Last night was my office Christmas party – this year going along to the Feast of the Pharaohs, this years version of the big party that the Christmas Company hold out at Easthampstead Park every year.
We’d been along to one of these a couple of years ago when the theme was Cirque Noel so it was interesting to see what was different.
The first and perhaps biggest change is thanks to the smoking restrictions that came in over the summer. Even though it is held in a marquee, the same rules apply as to any other indoor event, so whereas last time we knew a number of people who didn’t really enjoy the event thanks to the smokers on adjacent tables, this time it was totally smoke free – well aside from the copious amounts of dry ice of course…
As before you arrived in the bar area, and there was an hour or so of mingling and chatting over drinks before dinner. The curtain was then drawn back on the main marquee which again was over eighty tables surrounding a central stage. The courses of the four course dinner were again interspersed with entertainment on the main stage, and this was again later turned over to the guests for the disco. They also once again had the dodgems – just the kind of thing to settle your stomach after dinner!
Perhaps the thing that didn’t quite work this year was the theme – as someone on our table put it “Do you suppose anyone who planned this has actually been to Egypt?â€? The dancers performed several times during the evening, with routines that had a vague hint of Arabian Nights at times, and then there was a fire-eater that turned up later on. There was a brief moment of Walk Like an Egyptian, but aside from that there was nothing that you could specifically tie up with the theme. In fact it got positively bizarre towards the end with some weird routine with the fire eater that looked like some sort of pagan ritual, and then an even more weird routine with a net curtain… Maybe as a table full of software engineers we’re not the ideal people to judge, but anyway, we didn’t quite get what was going on!
The food was pretty good though, although the goats cheese and spinach starter seemed to be a bit of a love it or hate it option. As before it all turned up piping hot despite the nearly 1000 guests in the marquee needing to be served. We didn’t stay much after dinner, as with it being a Wednesday night, Beth had to be up and awake for school the next morning. However we did manage to get on the dodgems before we went – pictures of that along with the rest of the evening can be found in our picture galleries.
All in all, it was a great evening, and hopefully we’ll get a chance to go along to whatever they put on next year.
A Quiet Last Day? No Way…
Maybe it was optimistic to expect my last day before the Christmas Holiday to be quiet…
So far this morning:
- Last parcel from Amazon turns up having been damaged in transit – and probably no time to replace the damaged contents. Just waiting for Amazon to get back to me. Update: Just got an e-mail from Amazon – replacement items being despatched first class.
- After half a days worth of testing, we’ve found a trailing space in a bit of test data. Following a quick fix, as it is a fully validated system we have to go all the way back to the start of the tests and start again.
- Just had a call from one of my colleagues who should be on annual leave today. His team is doing an install in Cardiff and got to site to discover that they’d left the install CD that he’d put together for them at home.
- Had a moderation request from the Affirming Liberalism site – Peter Ould probably about as opposite in Anglican terms as you can get has linked to the site under the category “heresy” pairing it up with an unrelated video and a comment about growing liberal Churches seemingly implying that he doesn’t think there are any… Of course he’s most welcome to come along and visit St James – but he’d probably have trouble finding a seat, especially over the next couple of days.
Anybody Any Good With Oranges and Cocktail Sticks?
A few years back, St James would hold a single Christingle service on Christmas Eve, then came the year that 500 people all turned up…
After that the decision was taken to hold the service twice, at 2pm and 4pm, and to allocate seating using free tickets.
Roll on to this year, and we had three services planned, at 2pm, 4pm and 6pm, with 200 tickets for each. The tickets were made available at the beginning of December, and within days had gone, and we’ve had so many people phoning up wanting tickets, that we’ve now had to add a fourth Christingle service at 12 o’clock – and it looks likely that we’ll fill the Church then too.
That of course leaves us with one big problem, traditionally the junior choir have made the actual Christingle’s – not too much of a problem when we had one service, but with so many people coming along now, short of bringing child slavery to Finchampstead we need lots of extra help to put them all together. It’s not overly complicated – basically four cocktail sticks, a glow stick (much to the chagrin of the traditionalists the combination of small children, candles and a jam packed church was too much for Health and Safety), an orange and some red ribbon – but there are a lot to do. The production line gets going on Saturday afternoon at the Parish Centre!
Once those four services are done though, there is the other popular service, Midnight Mass – one service we can’t do more than once, so we just have to try and fit everybody in. Last year we had people standing in the vestry and more people standing in the north aisle – heaven knows where we’ll put people if more turn up this year.
A Conversation
So as a Churchwarden, I tend to have a pretty packed diary – indeed my reply earlier in the week when someone at work asked if I had a free week to visit a customer in the US before Christmas was to laugh…
So at 10:25am, my phone rings.
Beth: Hi, do you want to go along to the school Christmas production this year – it’s Grease?
Me: Yeah, when is it?
Beth pauses and says: In a couple of weeks on Thursday, Friday and Saturday…
Me: Well there are six weekends before Christmas, is it the 23rd/24th November – that’s a couple of weeks time?
Beth: No, I think it’s in December…
Me: Any idea when, so I can see whether I’m free…
Beth: Hold on, I’ll go see if I can find a poster…
Phone gets put down and the merry sounds of playtime can be heard in the background.
Beth: Can’t find one, might be 14th/15th December, is that okay?
Richard: Yes can do that weekend.
Beth: You want to come?
Richard: Okay.
Beth: Okay, I’ll reserve tickets for us.
So anyway, assuming the date is right (14th/15th doesn’t clash with anything) I’m off to see the school production of Grease. Hopefully the dates are right as it would be a shame to miss it – on the basis of previous productions I’ve been to at the school it should be pretty good.