Christmas Cake.

The snow is still with us but with little sun it was more on the gloomy side today. I've been rather busy as Christmas approaches with breakneck speed. I baked a Christmas cake today, tut tut the traditionalists would say. They made their cakes weeks ago , spent more weeks lovingly feeding them with brandy and then covered them with a layer of pristine white icing tastefully decorated with hand made icing flowers. Hopefully my cake will taste good, I soaked the fruit in whiskey (almost the last bottle of spirits in the cupboard and I didn't think Creme de menthe would do.) I had almost everything the recipe called for except glace cherries and the bottle of powdered nutmeg wasn't labelled but it smelt right. Perhaps a bit more whiskey poured over it now it is baked. The family are not that keen on icing so it won't matter if the cake doesn't have any.
The chickens have a big feeder of corn inside their hen house (shed) but I do feed the wild birds in this kind of weather. No sooner was the corn on the ground than a pair of robins were there helping themselves.

The powdery snow is easy to walk but soon compresses to treacherous ice. As Peter still has a week of walking up and down the hill in the dark I cleared, swept and salted a path all the way to Paul's bit of the drive. A slip and a fall could easily set off a flare up of Peter's arthritis and leave him in a lot of pain for several weeks.
I had planned to do the boys' bedrooms but instead put up decorations in the sitting room instead. I may be quite un-houseproud in terms of daily cleaning but even I could not put up decorations without a general clean-up. At least now the sitting room is ready for guests. I just need the lights and a tree. I'll get the boys to cut down some of the leylandii in the yard for my 'modern' Christmas tree. That has the advantage of not only being free but not having needles to drop. And they have to be cut back anyway.