The Festive Season.

We had a thoroughly enjoyable Christmas (click here for the film) owing to Sophy, Candy, Quinn and Adam being with us from the 23rd to the 30th. On Christmas Eve Sophy, Candy and Quinn put up the decorations and dressed the tree. On Boxing Day Sophy and Adam took Quinn tobogganing at Sassotetto and in the evening we all went to the Presepe Vivente in Comunanza which this year used a first century rather than a seventeenth century setting. On the Tuesday we went to Ascoli and on Thursday the girls treated us all to a dinner at the Farfense in Santa Vittoria to celebrate Pat's birthday. The only downside was that such unwonted activity left us too exhausted to go to the Conways' New Year's Eve party.

    You may recall that last year the village went crib crazy. This year  they went even further as you can see from the film at the top of the page and from these photographs. We had been worried that the journey to Ancona to pick up Candy and Quinn from and return them to the airport might be made perilous by heavy snow. Thankfully, despite early forecasts to the contrary, we were snow free. However, I had jestingly suggested to Pat that I petition the Pope to transfer Christmas from December to June. Imagine my surprise, gentle reader, when I discovered from an explanatory note attached to the crib inside the parish church that Christ's birth had originally been celebrated on 24th June until the Church decided to change it to its present date to christianise people's celebration of the pagan feast of Sol Invictus.

   Another improvement on last year's festivities was that Christmas Day and New Year's Day both fell on a Sunday so obviating the hallucinatory effect to which I was subjected in 2010.

  "One last thing" as the late Steve Jobs would say before revealing the latest technological wunderkind to emerge from Apple's womb:  my happy Christmas, thanks to help from the Apple Forums, has just been rounded off by my domain name www.jamesrichards.eu working once again.