Decorations.

There was still a frost this morning but with clouds and rain fast approaching the day was much warmer than recently.

Very pretty skies at sunrise.

Today we had the charities Christmas Fair on in the Hall.  There were stalls manned by a wide range of local groups; churches, scouts, greyhound rescue, the donkey sanctuary, the railway station museum and the RNLI to name but a few. I try to support the charities as best I can without ending up with a whole lot of stuff I don't need. This year I bought hand made Christmas cards and a large and bushy lemon scented geranium. Usually I buy cakes or biscuits and this year one of the church groups was selling home made sweets including truffles but I'm successfully losing a few pounds in advance of the Christmas calories so had to pass them by. I did buy a pack of glow sticks. The sort you break to activate and then wear as bracelets etc. I'll take them to next week's aerobics and share them with my fellow dancers for the final bop of the year.

On my way home I called in to see Peter at the RNLI shop. I didn't think he would have any customers but he's just informed me he took nearly £50 which is not bad for a wet December day. 

When I got home I began putting up our minimal Christmas decorations. (There are others around the place.) This I thought would be a fairly quick job but once again I was wrong. Having found the box with the wood for the indoor tree it didn't take me long to slot the wood on to the metal rod, only to discover that I was a few sticks short. The extra sticks used to be kept on top of the storage box as they were too long to fit inside. They must have got separated and I do remember fairly recently coming across them and thinking they were surplus to requirements. I'm not sure what happened to them after that but I'm guessing I disposed of them. As  stopgap I drilled a hole through a block of wood to fill the space and then had to take the tree apart and build it again. The small bit of driftwood at the bottom wouldn't move so I left it for now. Mr Mouse has gone on display too and there are some lights and other decorations around the place. The orange peel stars look more like starfish now so I shall make new ones next year. They are easy enough to do, just use a tiny cutter on some orange peel and a needle and thread to make the loops. The next thing will be to set up the big driftwood tree by the garden gate.