not all that glitters is gold

… because sometimes it’s just the twinkle of the gleaming bathroom fittings.

Yep, I’ve spent the whole day tidying up, putting things away and other things out, and dusting, vacuuming, polishing, scrubbing, … And who’d have thought that cleaning was actually so suitable for producing the proper Christmas spirit?!

I sure didn’t expect that, but it seems to work. Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m looking forward to having (almost) all the pack back together. My two younger sisters are arriving home tomorrow and our brother will join us on Sunday. True, our parents are somewhere in southern India, cruising a National Park on a motorcycle or something equally cool, but it’ll be so nice to have all my siblings back together! Since there’s five of us, that rarely happens. There’s always at least one somewhere abroad for any family event throughout the year. But we usually manage to get together for Christmas!

So I’m preparing some local dishes for the two that are coming from abroad (one from the UK, the other from Berlin, which is not abroad as such, but it’s on the other side of Germany, so it counts!) for the weekend, and planning dinner for the 24th and when we’ll go to Church and what we’ll do in between… We’ll have our grandmother join us on Christmas Eve and so far, the plan is to go to Church for the afternoon service, which is weirdly early, but the later one is always so packed and it might be nice to go about it in a more leisurely way. Then we’ll have tea and gingerbread and each of us can show some photos of what they did this year – catching up, you know? Then we’ll have dinner, then do the presents – which don’t exist this year since we’re all broke and out of ideas and time, but we’ll pretend there are some – and then on to dessert and champagne! Sound good? Yeah, I think so, too.

And I can imagine how ecstatic our dog will be when they all start showing up! He almost has a heart attack from joy every time one of the pack turns up.

Have I mentioned that I’m looking forward to seeing them all again? Even if it means taking all my office/work stuff out of my sister’s room and turning it back into a bedroom – it doesn’t matter, I just want her to be happy to be home again. That’s also the reason I polished the bathroom fittings, because that’s part of coming home: clean, fresh bed linen, a glitteringly clean bathroom and local food. And a dog that is narrowly avoiding a heart attack from sheer joy of seeing you.

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