Living in a house share is great for a number of reasons – a ready-made friendship group, planned social events and not living with my parents being just some of them! But one of the best reasons is because I get two Christmas days! One on actual Christmas, and one on a random day in December where my housemates and I decide to go all out and have a Christmas Day together.
The last time we did this it actually snowed! We all woke up to see our garden covered in a sheet of white, and it was so cosy in the kitchen as we all sleepily made our way there in our pyjamas and slippers to make various cups of tea and coffee so we had energy for the day ahead.
“Merry Christmas!”
“Can you believe this?!”
“Doesn’t it really feel like today could be Christmas?!”
It was so cute, the garden really did look like a Christmas card! Especially as we’d put the tree up a few days before, so the twinkly lights and the complete mish mash of all our different baubles and decorations gave it a really special, inclusive feel. Us girls then left the boys to start cooking our Christmas day breakfast in the kitchen together – smoked salmon and scrambled eggs on toast – while we went and got ready for the day.
The rest of our morning was spent swapping Secret Santa presents – where we learned there’s a definite male/female divide when defining the word “funny” and let’s just leave it at that – and beginning to get the Christmas dinner cooked. All of this was accompanied by a strong Christmas playlist created by our music maestro, Laura, playing in the background. We strayed from the traditional turkey dinner and went for beef instead (the traditionalists in our group wanted Yorkshire puddings, but wouldn’t have them with anything other than a roast beef!) but made sure to have all the usual traditional trimmings associated as well. This was a great idea until it came to making the much desired Yorkshires… it turns out Scott was either winging the recipe way more than he’d originally let on or was a few too many Bucks Fizz’s deep! They got very burnt.
One of the cool things of doing Christmas like this is we all have our own little Christmas quirks and traditions to bring to the table. I come from a family who avoid “organised fun” (read: Monopoly) like the plague so instead I took charge of the Christmas Day walk. In the snow this was even more magical. Round the back of our house is a park with a few hills and slopes, and here we found lots of families with young children all taking advantage of a snowy weekend and the sleds that had no doubt been in their garages for the last 365 days. None would be aware we were treating the day as Christmas Day 2.0 of course, but this sight just made us all feel as if Christmas really had come early!
Upon returning to the house it was time for the organised fun I so actively avoid, with a great big game of Monopoly! Except our version was slightly less traditional as Joe’s family play a drinking game version of it… I think the more I leave to your imaginations with that one the better!
We started tucking into the cheese and crackers, red wine and leftovers after the game had finished and made way for another common family tradition – the Christmas Day argument! We couldn’t decide which film to watch. Laura wanted Elf, Natalie was rooting for Love Actually, I couldn’t understand why you would watch anything other than Home Alone and James agreed. Scott and Joe just wanted to go to the pub!
However we eventually settled on none of those options and went with It’s A Wonderful Life – a classic! Joe brought down the TV from his room and found one of those YouTube videos of a log fire to play on it. We all snuggled up together under blankets on the sofas and beanbags, eating chocolates from the Roses tin, and we had a big roaring (virtual) fire going and the lights on the Christmas tree twinkling around us. It was the perfect second family Christmas for all of us, and I can’t wait to share more of them with my housemates.
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