Christmas at the Quinn's: Part 1

Christmas-eve-eve

I do love a good Christmas, it always feels like the time where everyone, even myself, is happy and joyous. For the past 4 years my wife and I have hosted both sides of the family for Christmas dinner; this works well for us for many reasons but mainly it means we both get to have a good few drinks on Christmas Day.

The mammoth prep was going to start on the 23rd AKA Christmas eve-eve. 

We both broke up from work on the 22nd and (clinging mercilessly onto our youth) met up in town for the obligatory 'Mad Friday' Christmas drink.  Five hours and as many bottles of prosecco later, we where calling my mum to pick us up as we were in no state to drive and there was not a taxi to be seen.  We felt good.  Merry, in the Christmas spirt and ready to tackle out Christmas eve-eve prep.

I got up super-early, mapped out our schedule on the white board (my wife might be a teacher but I love a good whiteboard plan) did an inventory of the cutlery draw (nothing worse than having to wash knifes half way through dinner because people feel they need 2 knifes for there starter, one to eat the starter the other to butter there bread), and created a shopping list of everything we needed for Christmas dinner. I put my christmas jumper and antlers on, made my wife a brew and headed up stairs to wake her and get this Merry Christmas show on the road.  She looked a little confused, it was usually only christmas day itself where I was known to be up before 9am by choice but I was feeling productive and festive and - oh fuck me! Still pissed!

This was dangerous and my wife knew it.  Here she had me about to do a supermarket shop, full of Christmas cheer and prosecco from the night before.  It wasn’t my loose morals she was excited about though, it was my loose purse strings.  This time it was her turn to skip merrily around Sainsburys throwing in table centre pieces and a new slow cooker.

However, by the time we got to the check out the effects of the night before were wearing off and I still don’t know whether it was the price of the food bill, the hangover kicking in or a 12 hour bug, but I went green and spent the journey home throwing up into a carrier bag (a bloody 10p bag for life 'n all - I might add).

That was me for the rest of the day.  I spent it flitting between my bed and the ensuite while my wife worked her way through the white board list I’d so helpfully made at god-knows what time that morning.