Filling your cup

And not even having to go anywhere to do it

Our table at a New Year’s get-together at home - scallop place mats an absolute steal from H&M plus beautiful splatter bowls I’ve bought home from our trips to Denmark, from Danish-Spanish ceramic shop, Familianna. The leek puff pastry in the corner is this one - super quick, super easy, super tasty with extra df and gf tweaks for me and my intolerances!

I hope you've all had a befitting start to the year, whatever that may look like to you, and I hope that all festivities were joyous!

We had a very lovely time, thank you, doing not a lot at all. I'd go so far as to say it was the nicest Christmas yet, precisely because we didn't do a lot. For many years, I've always felt that we ‘should’ be doing certain things over Christmas; a Christmassy show, a Santa grotto, an eye-poppingly expensive and yet somehow always faintly disappointing light trail. It's always been at my instigation but this year I just didn't get around to organising any of it. I was briefly worried the children might be disappointed but though they are still young, all under twelve, no one seemed to think they were missing out on something and everyone agreed they'd much rather stay cosy watching Home Alone and the like, eating popcorn, instead of grinning and bearing it (or not, as the case sometimes can be) doing Christmassy stuff just for the sake of it.

So we did what felt right and stayed home and watched family movies nearly every night, interspersed with a couple of cinema trips (I loved Wicked!). We baked a lot and watched a whole bunch of Christmas specials (including, er, me on University Challenge). We hosted friends, had family over, said no to the things we didn't feel like doing. We spent days eating leftovers. For the first time in half a decade, I picked up a notebook and decided to start a journal. Sadly, my husband and I failed to make it through Home for Christmas after all, but boy did we soak up every single box set going; Black Doves! The Day of The Jackal! Other stuff I can't remember but I'm sure was good! Anyway. It was glorious.

Amongst all of this, the words ‘filling your cup’ came to me quite a bit, whilst doing ordinary things like literally filling my cup with boiling water for tea, and they wiggled their way into that new notebook/ journal of mine. I thought about how creative people always talk about ‘filling their cup’ - I say this, a lot. There's nothing wrong with it at all, in fact I quite like the saying, but I realised that when I say that, I'm almost always looking to things outside of me and my life and my home to fill my cup as an automatic default; books, films, places to go and see. When actually, maybe being at home, specifically this home we've made, and being with my children and my husband, whilst also then being able to potter about on my own, fills my cup more than anything. Or at least it's what does right now. Which sort of makes the idea of home feel even more meaningful, and makes me all the more grateful.

Anyway. These are just my thoughts and feelings on the turn of the year! I hope you got what you needed also from the post-Christmas lull and I hope that even if you didn't, some of the above might give you a way to look back and mull over it. Here is to seeing where things go, and thank you again, so much, for letting me write to you and share these musings - it's so nice to know I've got this space, and that you’re here also!