Christmas Eve promised fine weather for the important date to follow:
And, indeed, Christmas morning opened with gently warm rays of sunshine which continued throughout the day. No bleak mid-winter here!
I’d accepted an invitation for Christmas lunch in Lucca.
First I made sure my cats got their festal breakfast. Carlotta seemed particularly pleased.
I then made my way to Bagni di Lucca’s railway station. Happily, in Italy most trains still run on time, even on December 25th!
The Serchio River below the Ponte Della Maddalena (I don’t like to call it ‘il Ponte Del Diavolo’) still shows how little rainfall we’ve had this autumn, despite the recent rainy days.
It was lovely to be in Lucca and the Christmas lunch prepared by my hostess was wonderfully traditional and included turkey, sprouts, roast potatoes and yorkshire pudding. We couldn’t find any cranberry sauce in the city but the American apple butter made an excellent replacement!
We were also joined by four sweet mutts – my hostess was dog-sitting for two of them.
Dessert was my hostess’s cheesecake and my Madeira, which I’d baked at home that morning.
We pulled our Christmas crackers, read their characteristically lousy jokes (e. g. ‘Why did the golfer wear two pairs of trousers? In case he got a hole in one!!!’), wore our paper crowns and exchanged presents (which included chocolates, biscuits and a beautiful little crystal angel).
I could not have wished for more excellent company and more delicious fayre. For an afternoon I felt there was a corner of Italian Lucca that had become a lovely old-style English Christmas…
This was the saddest Christmas 2018 as we were not together for the first time since our residency in Longoio, only one previous time and a half we have been apart the other time was when we test drove Boveglio over Christmas I spent it with my parents and had a second Christmas after at Boveglio the half time was when Francis was in Greenwich Hospital he was there Christmas Eve but we managed to have a very late Christmas lunch with my parents. Not bad going I suppose for 41 years together! Christmas time is when you miss your dearest ones as I do my Babbo despite we never celebrated Christmas with all this present giving or lavish lunches or dinners we lacked the means, luckily we are and never have been big eaters. As a Florentine my Babbo luckily enjoyed cooking and we loved his culinary offerings in fact we had most of our Sunday lunches together.
I do appreciate your lovely comments very much cara moglie.