Steaming ahead to the big day

WHAT KATI DID NEXT: Well, Merry Christmas to you all — it’ll be the last time I get to say it before the big day and I feel like I should, it being the happy season and all that.

Actually this year, I am feeling a tad jolly. It’s all to do with small children isn’t it? It started on the first of this merry month when we opened the door of our advent calendar.

I think my mother and I took it a step too far this year as he has four; two chocolate ones and two picture ones. Oh, and one on the computer, an animated one by the brilliant Jacquie Lawson.

I’m sure no child should have five advent calendars. Christmas overkill indeed. Put it like this — we’d seen Father Christmas twice by the sixth and a further three times since.

I’ve got Santa overkill (an official illness) but the boy is just lapping it up.

We did the Santa Express on the Bury steam train, which was as wonderful this year as it was last, tears in my eyes at the excitement in the children’s.

A big thank-you to all the volunteers who make those trips so wonderful and memorable for all. My father has cancer and last year discovered on the train that he really, and I mean really, enjoyed the Harvey’s Bristol Cream we were given to enjoy with our mince pie.

This year he enjoyed it just as much and that was a wonderful Christmas present for us all so I can’t thank all the steamies enough.

We saw the turning on of the lights at Grange-over-Sands in the Lake District with friends.

Santa was there as well, handing out sweets. We walked through the Christmas markets in Manchester, slightly too busy for my six-month- old who bawled his eyes out until we literally stepped back out on to the street where he stopped crying so abruptly he made passers-by laugh.

We spent a whole night decorating our front room with tinsel and baubles while the boy ran in and out of the kitchen where his granny was making Christmas cake.

Blimey, it sounds idyllic doesn’t it. I won’t mention then, the plumbing under the sink that gave up, the boiler that packed in and both of the cars that stopped working.

Merry Christmas one and all.