This year we stayed home. My wife wasn't feeling very well and Ania is in the middle of mock exams, so the extra stress of going away for Christmas although nice had to wait.

As it turned out I really wish we had gone to St Ives again. It really is the best time to go. Minimal tourists but everything is open and strangely good weather usually.

This Christmas was a slightly lack lustre affair and everything seemed to go a little wrong.

I ended up buying the Christmas tree myself. A nice tree but I have never seen needles fall so fast! Thankfully it wasn't expensive and all the best ones had been sold already. Being a man I found one and purchased it within 10 mins, no 2 hour searching...

Due to the pressures of work and my wife being ill, I decorated the house minimally and the Christmas tree, even more minimalistically than ever before (see below) much to the dissapointment of the family but they were nowhere to be seen to help so tough better than nothing.

For Christmas eve, naturally I prepped the meal again. I tried to make it a little better for them. Since I don't eat fish (well other than fish fingers which isn't really fish is it!) I got them some nice M&S type fish meal.

I made probably the nicest mushroom soup I have ever made, simmering for a few hours and bursting with flavour. Mum would have been proud. 

Then disaster struck. I was adding a tiny bit of salt at the very end. The salt bottle has a double lid, one side sprinkle the other for spoons. Gently tipping the sprinkling side over the pan, the other end opened up depositing half a tonne of salt into my perfect soup!! Nooooooooooo

I had to pour half of it out, add a lot of water by which time it was effectivelly dish water! I added a tin of supermarket soup to help but it was terrible!

My fish fingers were reduced to wooden fingers as I left them in the air fryer for 1 minute too long, even though I had checked constantly, but the rest was fine it just wasn't anything special!

I made Poppy Seed cake again this year (recipe on the blog list somewhere), but for some strange reason I decided to use up my plain flour which I had a lot of, before it went out of date. Little did I realised plain flour does not rise with yeast at all! In the end it was like 2 slabs of beige concrete, tasted okish but the birds had it. So according to Polish tradition, at least the birds will be wealthy in 2026, but not me.

On the plus side I discovered that Lidl frozen Black Forrest Gataux was actually quite nice! Maybe there was even something natural in it who knows?

So all in probably one of the least successful Christmas Eve meals we ever had, but still better than nothing.

Never mind hopefully 2026 will bring something better?