A Beautiful Sight, We're Happy Tonight

This is another Christmas post, how self-indulgent am I?  This is more for the benefit of dear friends living abroad at the moment who are missing our very British Christmas and don't get to witness the extravagant re-telling of my thrilling anecdotes in the flesh. Haha. Flesh. Ha. 
Last night, my brother Jerome came home (ha, rhymes) from university and we merrily began the festive task of decorating the tree. It was a night of....well...there were ups and downs haha. 

APOLOGIES in advance for the utter lack of correlation between story and pictures. 

We dug out the boxes of decorations and realised the new box of fairy lights was missing. Searched all manner of secret hiding places but to no avail. They were nowhere to be found. Gone. Sucked into the black hole that is 92 Gloucester Road. 

Went back to the cupboard - and now I must interrupt myself here and draw your attention to the fact that this cupboard is that cupboard everyone has where you're allowed to be a massive mess. Y'know, you quickly open the door, shove something in and slam it shut. Tape it back up. Reapply the restraints etc. So immediately, it didnt bode well that we were looking for strings of lights in said cupboard. 
So anyway, I spied a plug poking out of this mountain of accumulated crap and realised with dismay that they were last year's lights. My mother, in a fit of 'let's get Christmas out the way', had just bundled them into a ball and thrown them into the back. 

So we drove to 24hr Tesco to buy new lights and LO! they'd run out. We bought a kilo of Quality Street and some champagne instead. 

Yeah, this is a giraffe wearing a wreath, get over it. 

At home, we found a bag of lights in the back of another cupboard that all worked apart from a section in the middle. Anyone care to explain how that is possible???
They were SO tangled, so Jerome spent ages unravelling them, only to realise they were so long, they stretched the length of the entire house. Infuriated by the ridiculousness of the situation, we forced them onto the tree and wound the rest round the whole sitting room. 

Exhausted, we opened the box of decorations and found the new box of perfectly working lights sitting on top. Mocking us with their presence. 

And then I made paper chains. And ate some doughnuts. And we watched Elf.

Happy Christmas, one and all!