Helen;1264674 wrote: rained for a good six hours in my part of southwest england today.
now, 10pm, the stars are out and its quite chilly out there.................. tomorrow the rain and gales are back !!!!!
Yup, it's the same here in central southern England. Rained all day! Luckily not pouring torrential rain, just drizzly rain as I had to go out in it.
I thought it was quite amusing that in two separate shops I heard 2 women with little girls talking. One was talking on a mobile, the other was talking to her friend. But they both said EXACTLY the same thing! They said, in amused voices, "She's just like Peppa Pig today, she's jumping up and down in muddy puddles!"
I haven't a clue who Peppa Pig is but I grinned to myself and mentally applauded a book/TV show which allows kids to enjoy splashing in muddy puddles just the way we used to do, whilst the parents find it cute and amusing instead of shouting at them to stop getting dirty and stop splashing the adults!
Our town is turning on its Christmas lights tonight.
The town was full of stalls cooking up hotdogs and hamburgers or pizza slices or Asian foods. There were stalls full of whizzy, twizzly, twirly flashy things for the kids to wave in the dark. There were stalls selling mincepies and hot mulled wine for the adults. And other stalls selling Christmassy bits and bobs.
At 5pm there is a parade through the town. Folks dress up as Christmassy characters. In town today there was a chap dressed up as an elf sitting on a reindeer. It was one of those costumes where his top half was the elf and his bottom half was the reindeer legs, then he had fake elf legs hanging down the sides of the reindeer. Know the sort of thing I mean? He actually looked really good. :wah: Lots of people were dressed as clowns, including several people in wheelchairs. We have a shop in town where you can hire motorised wheelchairs for the day. Lots of folks rent them out and then whiz around our little shopping mall on them. They love to run over peoples toes and then yell at the people hopping in pain to get out of the way! They can be pretty lethal actually! There should be a speed limit for them in the mall! Anyway, today quite a few of them were dressed up in clown costumes too, so it was really nice to see them taking part and being nice for once!
So the parade has a horse-pulled sleigh in it with the town mayor dressed as Santa and some little christmas fairies in with him. All the characters either walk before the sleigh or behind it. We have 2 main roads in our town and they run parallel to each other as they're both for one-way traffic. So the parade walks down one road, around the corner, then back up the next road until it comes to the town green and bandstand.
Santa disembarks onto the bandstand, whilst the townsfolk mill onto the town green. The dressed up characters walk around the bandstand or amongst the townsfolk, saying Happy Christmas to them and handing out songsheets. Then the towns operatic society, all dressed in Victorian costumes, sing Christmas carols. They encourage the townsfolk to join in too and quite a few do.
Then there is a countdown, from 10 to zero, and at zero everyone cheers as the towns Christmas lights are all switched on. Then there is a beautiful fireworks display for half an hour followed by folks mingling, greeting friends, browsing the stalls, skating on the outdoor ice rink which was opened this afternoon and which will stay until after Christmas and generally having a good time.
The bad news is that the rain will turn the town green into a mudbath and folks will be slipping and sliding their way across it all evening. :wah:
Next Saturday sees the opening of the German markets in Southampton and Winchester. They set up lots of little stalls that look like chalets made of gingerbread. They sell the most gorgeous things too. Really unusual things that you just don't usually see in this country. Southampton is the better market because it has more chalet-stalls and a wider variety of unusual things to buy. In particular, their glassware is extremely beautiful and very unusual. The food and drink are exceptionally good and the bierkellars are always packed to bursting!
In Winchester there is a smaller market but some of it spills inside Winchesters beautiful cathedral, which is always well worth a visit. Again they have an outdoor ice rink for the whole of the Christmas period. Although there are less German stalls here, none of the stunning glassware, for example, there are lots of contemporary chalet-stalls selling items made by students at Winchesters College of Art. Highly-renowned as a college, they sell hand made jewellery, clothes that the students have designed, made and had modelled in catwalk shows, artworks, etc. Because Winchester is a terribly 'posh' place, (apparently it'sthe most expensive place to live in England, outside of London!) a lot of the chalet-stalls are taken over by small companies which sell hand-made jewellery or hand-made handbags or hand-made scarves, etc. All of which are terribly beautiful but horrendously expensive! We're talking a second mortgage here just to buy a handbag!
The shops in Winchester are lovely and always worth a visit and of course, both German market sell all that delicious food and drink and scrummy cakes too!