A Pause in Advent

I remember doing A Pause in Advent this time last year, and here we are again.  Thank you very much Floss for getting us all thinking about it again.  Its so crazy to think that it was twelve short months ago when we last did this!

Last year I stuck with tradition and spoke about whatever would be spoken about in Church at the lighting of the candles.  You can read about it here if you would like to.  This year I'm going to talk about tradition and what we're up to in our small corner of the world in the lead up to Christmas.  

So far we've not been particularly Christmassy-neither of us are big fans of Christmas cake, and so i make a Madeira closer to the time and decorate that, therefore that's not a job i need to think of just yet!  The things-commercial as they are-that have signalled to us its Christmas time are things like adverts (Cola, Irn Bru and John Lewis), the smokey smell in the air, and the lovely Yankee Candles I'm finally allowed to fill the house with!  The traditions that we will be following this week will be the putting up of the decorations-something we do on the first of December.  We pull out our many decorations and our own advent calender and start making the house glittery, bright, more welcoming than normal and altogether like a scene in a Christmas movie!