I'm about to wrap some Christmas presents.

Am I getting ahead of myself?

These are to send to Sydney for the Kiwi Cousins, along with a birthday present, so I sort of have an excuse.

I do love Christmas.

This weekend we are going to make decorations from pine cones and quangdong nuts. The latter are also known as native peaches and grow wild.

The Absolute Gent's father, George, adores pies made from them. Recently, we found a veritable orchard near the shack, and loaded our sun hats with the small, bright red fruit.

I divested them of the nuts and stewed the fruit, adding a generous helping of sugar.

And more sugar.

And quite a bit more.

They were still very, very bitter, with an aftertaste of bitter.

So we didn't eat the quangdongs, but we kept their nuts.

Imogen and Hal are very excited about the decorations. Hal has to take one to his beautiful teacher on Monday for the class tree. We met said lady at our local shops this evening. Hal proceeded to throttle himself as a means of overcoming his excitement/pleasure/embarrassment that his most loved teacher was before him, discussing cacti and carols (as you do).