My Springtime Christmas Dinner

 

As most of you will know, Christmas Day 2024 was a blow-out for me but not in the usual way. During my stem cell transplant stay, I  was admitted to a ward in Addenbrookes Hospital with neutropenic sepsis at 2:00 am on Christmas Day and was a bit weak and feeble for the next couple of weeks. I did in fact eat some hospital turkey and roast potatoes on that day but my food review for it would be a bit flaky.

So what a lovely surprise it was to get an invitation from my friends Pete and Sue to come for a March Christmas Dinner at their place! And that is what I did today, with all the trappings and the good cheer that the day has always brought in my life. 

So today, in bright sunshine, I cycled up to their place and we sat outside in the sunshine before the turkey and potatoes and sprouts etc made their appearance, as you see above. Sue had even found a Christmas decoration hiding under a couch, so we had a token of midwinter there. Crackers are a bit harder to come by in March though. 

So with the nearly-equinox sun high in the sky, I had a lovely compensation for my missed Christmas and a really nice afternoon with friends (and Pete and I played some Irish music after the Christmas Pudding had digested itself)

Today makes me happy in lots of different ways, which you may well be able to guess at if you have been following what I have written these last few months. For one thing, I love it when people take charge of their own rituals and celebrations. I loved all the rituals that Cro and I invented for the important (and unimportant) moments in our lives: chaining our padlock to a Chinese mountain rail; swimming at dawn on Midsummer's Day; always cooking too many pancakes at the campsite so that we would have to take the rest around to our friends. 

Inventing your own rituals makes you remember how important they are to you, and helps you to remember those moments even more strongly. And what could be more memorable than a March Christmas dinner on a sunny Spring day, because you knew that a friend had missed out on the December original?

Another reason it makes me happy is that today is another example of all the hugely-supportive friendship that I have received over the last two and a half years, through Cro's illness and then my own. You cannot change the circumstances and events that face you in life (especially these kind) but the way in which you are able to respond to them is massively helped by knowing that other people are on your side and know what you are going through. The saying "a problem shared is a problem halved" has always been true, and just knowing that people have my back is all I need. Friends can't solve my problems, but they make everything much more wieldy by just being there and knowing what is going on and asking how I am. 

I feel very blessed!