The greening of Christmas

I cooked all my wrinkly apples into a pulp this morning to put on my porridge.  This is good in two ways:  firstly, it's tasty (and can I count it as one of my five-a-day?  Can I?), and secondly it helps to alleviate the guilt of having left all those fine English apples to go wrinkly in the first place.  Unfortunately I still have half a pan of pulp left now, so I'm going to have to come up with something else to do with it.  There's only so much porridge a girl can eat.

Anyway, on to business.  I am trying to put together my Christmas wish list of things to avoid excess effort and expenditure in my nearest and dearest*.  So far, the list consists of:

- a sewing kit:  I already have two needles, a bodkin and some scissors, so I'm thinking a tape measure, a couple of reels of thread etc.  My level of requirement centres more around button replacement and hem repairs rather than anything more sophisticated.  A tupperware box to put it all in would probably be handy too.

- art materials:  I have asked my mother to trawl my father's unused art supplies.  People give him lots of stuff which he never gets round to using so it's a kind of recycling.  Plus if I don't get round to doing anything with it myself then I don't need to feel too guilty as it wasn't bought specially for me.  Yay!

- door stop:  At the moment, I wedge my door open with a piece of folded paper, but it kinda spoils the look, yah?

- a folder into which I can put the recipes I tear out of the newspaper.  I'm a bit of a magpie for these.  I suppose one with clear plastic envelopes in it would be ideal - I'm not the tidiest of cooks.  You can always find my favourite recipes in my cookbooks by looking for the most heavily splattered pages.

Lots of love,

Jane x

* of course, if you are one of my nearest and dearest and have already bought something that is NOT on this list, rest assured I will still be happy to receive it...