Christmas is coming

My knitted scarf for the accessories stall

Breathe in....one, two, breathe out...and relax.Yesterday was our Christmas Fair at church. It gets a bit manic in the kitchen where me and my stirling team of workers serve tea, coffee, scones, gooey cake and a hot lunch, which every Christmas is cottage pie with mixed veg and gravy followed by apple crumble or mince pie with cream for a set price.  The meal is pre-cooked, brought in and then reheated in two industrial sized ovens.  We also offer cheese or ham salad rolls.  Then there's the mountain of washing up. We do have a dishwasher but no one seems to want to use it!  The kitchen staff arrive shortly after 9am and we open at 10am after we have given all the stall holders a free cup of tea or coffee. We start serving hot lunches at 11.30am and yesterday by 1.15pm we'd sold out of cottage pie and the rolls. I think next year we will need to up the cottage pies and not make quite so many crumbles because some stall holders never got a hot lunch and I felt bad about that. We also need to up the prices which has been £4 for the set meal for two years now.

A few Christmas cup-cakes 

I've been co-ordinating, cooking and serving the food for four years (two fairs a year) but helping and cooking for many more. The lunch time rush is crazy and those oven doors are open and shut so many times it's a wonder they don't come off their hinges. The fair finishes at 2pm and we got cleared away in record time yesterday and I was home just after 2.30pm. I find it physically and mentally exhausting and often have to snooze for a while to recharge my batteries. I'm that sort of person who struggles when I'm in a zone that I don't naturally belong!  I'm a back room girl but when you take on these leadership roles you have to find coping strategies. I've got better over the years and I've managed to fool a lot of people that I'm this confident super woman, huh! People don't believe me when I say how it affects me. However, I do make a rod for my own back because I push myself into danger areas occasionally but if I'm in control I cope better. In fact my coping strategies are to have control and plan, plan and plan. Being organised is very important and I wouldn't be able to do what I do if I wasn't.  I always think I am a introvert with an extrovert trying to escape!  I can amaze myself sometimes and other times I will walk away.

Christingles

So now I have the fair down to a fine art as planning starts in October. Hot on it's heels comes the Christingle service. The service is devised by The Children's Society but we adapt it for our church. I still have to book the organist and with a member of the ministry team we decide who is doing what, choose carols and I liaise with Sunday School and get posters out. Then there are the refreshments!

On the Friday before the service on the Sunday a few of us get together to make between 100 and 150 Christingles. One lady cuts all the stars out and provides the cocktail sticks and raisins, another buys all the oranges and delivers them and I buy the sweets, provide the red tape that goes around the middle and make sure we have candles from the church. I could probably make a Christingle in my sleep the amount of years I've done it. When my kids were tiny they used to come along with their lunch boxes and.....eat the sweets if they got the chance!

The run up to Christmas (which I love by the way) is always full on and my only worry (well not the only one but all hangs on this) is not to come down with a cold until all my commitments are over.  Quite often it happens just before Christingle! There are lots of people with colds just now including one of my kids so I'm just hoping that I can get through the next three weeks....then I can collapse.