Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! Our Christmas was just about perfect. We unpacked Christmas stockings, ate a VERY speedy breakfast, opened the rest of our gifts from under the tree (eeeee, The Collected Letters of Jane Austen!!!! and sparkly necklaces & earrings! and the new Jasper Fforde novel! and CDs by Shirley Bassey and Wimme! And, and, and - ! :) ), played various card games using the awesomely silly, fun Harry Potter playing cards I'd found in my Christmas stocking (Patrick knows me so well), and watched several episodes of "House", since Patrick had gotten the Season 3 boxset as one of his gifts.

It was a really, really good day, rounded off with delicious Christmas pie (lentils, veggies, and red wine, in a yummy pastry), garlicky roast potatoes & leeks, and then Christmas pudding with ice cream and mince pies. Best of all, there's enough left for us to munch off for dinner & dessert for the next few days.

My new necklace & earrings don't show up in full detail in this photo, but in real life, they're absolutely gorgeous...


...and the Christmas pie was awesome! I chopped the veggies, then Patrick cooked them in red wine, rolled out the pastry and wrote the message in it - P[atrick] loves S[teph] and M[aya] - , and I made the little Christmas tree decorations on top.


This morning, primed by 24 hours of reading equally delicious Jane Austen letters, I went back to Kat by Starlight for the first time in 3 weeks and plunged right in, writing the first 1,000-some words of Chapter 10. Not entirely coincidentally, they involve letter-writing - and letter-expunging, as Kat has to cut some of the incriminating lines out of her letter with useful little scissors...