First week of Advent

 After expressing some frustration at November being much warmer than usual, December is finally showing some signs of autumn, if not the beginnings of winter. We still haven't had our central heating boiler serviced, but perhaps this coming week we should...

My only gesture towards Christmas before December was to make our Christmas cake, as mentioned in the previous post. I still have half of last year's mincemeat in the fridge, and since I can't find suet (veggie or otherwise) in the supermarkets, I'm researching different suet-free Christmas puddings. Recommendations welcome. It's probably a good thing, as I'm pretty sure our usual veggie suet is one of those ultra-processed products that we're supposed to avoid. 

But November 30th was the first Sunday in Advent. I made soup for the first time since March, to share with our friends who have a meal with us every other Sunday. I wasn't sure if it was really cold enough for soup, but everyone appreciated it. 

I did also start reading a couple of different Advent 'plans' on the Bible app that I use. The 'plans' are quite variable in quality, so I tend to read more than one at a time. 

On Monday, I bought some stamps and Christmas cards. I also sent out one card (to a friend in the United States), and we collected the first card of the season from our PO Box. 

In the afternoon I went to the local reading group pre-Christmas gathering, where we all took food to share. 

In the evening, Richard and I walked along the sea-front and admired the lights:

On Tuesday - after some quite heavy rain over the weekend - I was pleased to see flamingoes back and visible in the Salt Lake, albeit in rather smaller numbers than usual:

Later in the day, I found my Christmas socks - some of which are getting rather old and holey, but I only wear them in December. 

In the evening, we watched our first Christmas film of the season, 'A boy called Christmas', which we had not seen before. 

On Wednesday, I bought this year's poinsettia:

On Thursday, I was expecting to put up our tree and decorations, but my two young assistants are sick with what is probably the 'flu, so we're postponing until next week. But I wanted to make some gesture towards the season... so I got out our Christmas mugs, and temporarily packed away the same number of normal mugs.

On Friday, we didn't need to do any supermarket shopping, but we did want to look for a few new things for our guest flat. We decided to go to Jumbo. It's a huge shop with good prices, but varied quality. We've learned to pick and choose what we buy there.

We didn't find some of the things we were looking for, but we did end up with quite a few other items which we hadn't realised we needed... as one does.  We were over an hour going round the store, then had to queue for about twenty minutes to pay. We got chatting to a friendly young woman ahead of us in the queue, which was a good way of passing the time. She said she had been to Jumbo three times since arriving in Cyprus in October, and that at the weekends it was worse.

We visit Jumbo at most once a year.  We do find some good bargains - I bought some more Christmas socks, for instance - but the noise and the general chaos is exhausting. 

In the afternoon, I started writing Christmas cards. We don't send nearly as many as we used to. In 2009, for instance, I wrote nearly 100 cards, of which 69 had to be posted. I used to print out a newsletter which I would fold to go into the cards, too.  It was a lengthy and tiring process, which is a bit sad since I love thinking about the people we send cards to, as I write them.

Gradually, over the past fifteen years, the numbers have reduced. I first stopped sending anything to people whom we had not heard of at all (in any way) within the previous three years. A few people on our list, sadly, died. Others made a point of going electronic, and said they preferred e-cards or emailed newsletters. Local folk mostly don't do cards at all.  

So now it's much easier - I send about thirty cards, mostly to family or old friends in the UK, and about half a dozen for local people. As for the newsletter, that only goes electronically now (to about a hundred people). I'll write it a bit later in the month, and send it out in the week before Christmas. It was always a bit stressful when I had to get it written and finalised - and then printed - in time to post with cards.

We don't expect many cards from the UK now. In previous years many have arrived well into January, as the postal service is so slow here, particularly in December. So we've always kept them, and displayed the previous year's cards when we put up our decorations. Last year we had far fewer than usual; unsurprising, as postage charges from the UK to Cyprus seem to be ridiculously high now. 

It's still just 66 euro cents for us to send cards, but costs over three pounds for people in the UK to send them here. And last year we heard from two people that cards they had posted to us had been returned with 'address unknown' - another failure of the postal system, apparently.  Perhaps there were others. So we still have not just last year's cards, but the previous year's too, to display. 

On Saturday morning I usually do the main housework - cleaning the bathrooms, changing the sheets, emptying the bins, dusting, mopping etc. I got out our warmer duvet, since it had - at last - started getting a bit chilly overnight. 

Then in the late afternoon we went to a Christmas party hosted by a local aid charity that we support. It was a pleasant evening with excellent food, and I still got home in time for our scheduled once-a-month extended family Zoom.

And so, the first week of Advent passed by. 

The news seems to be consistently bad, with violence and natural disasters all over the world. So I hope, more and more, for the second coming of Jesus, while preparing, mostly in a secular way, to celebrate the traditional date of the first one.