I have to admit I really enjoyed last years cold and bright Christmas and I miss the cheer of the snow, this year didn’t feel as festive to me and I have to also admit that I am becoming very tired of the mud that the almost constant rain has brought around my door.

Despite the unseasonal warmth (warmest Irish Christmas on record apparently) we still need to keep our fire lit. I have spent the last hour in the timeless chore of cutting kindling, emptying the ashes from our small stove and laying down the fire-start, I am sure every stove owner has their own way of setting the fire-start depending on what fuel they burn. We burn a mixture of peat briquettes and our own white-thorn wood, cut from the overgrown hedge earlier in the year. My partner and I even have our own ways of setting the briquettes, kindling and paper to start the fire and each is equally successful.

Some days my favourite part of starting the fire is cutting the kindling. At the moment we have a few wood-piles lying between the sitting room and the kitchen in our new house. We have a pile of saw-mill cut timber there which we have used for framing the walls, this pile is dwindling as we run out of wall framing timber (because happily it is in the walls) and the pile of cut-offs has grown. Some of the cut-offs will still be used in various jobs about the house however some pieces are destined to become kindling.

Every few days on of us goes out and picks a piece of wood that looks unsuitable for anything but kindling and we chop it up with our small axe. The chopping block is currently in the bathroom, incidentally that’s also where this year’s Christmas tree is. Doesn’t everyone keep their Christmas tree in the bathroom? Perhaps not. Our tree actually consists of a few Pine boughs that I cut the day before Christmas Eve and tied in a decorative fashion to a framing timber on the wall. I then decorated these with our small stash of Christmas decorations, I couldn’t find the stored box of decorations from last year so it was a bit improvised, none the less it is very pretty.

So the bathroom is very central to our activities this Christmas. The chopping block is a 2foot length of wood, 9x3inches, a cut-off of a roof beam. I enjoy chopping kindling. You really need to focus as your fingers are never far from the axe blade when you make that first incision that grips the piece of wood before you proceed to split it by hammering both the wood and the axe together down on the chopping block. It’s a very satisfying job, mark, split, gather the pieces into a basket.

Ever since axes have been used people have performed this task of making kindling for the fire. Perhaps it is the time of year that made me think of the generations of people, across the world, that tend to the cooking or winter fires, to warm and feed their families. Gathering and cutting firewood in some places or cutting turf, drying it and bringing it home as generations of Irish people have done over the centuries. Storing the winter fuel to keep it dry, ensuring it is not too far from the door especially in snowy or wet winters. For some people now the fire is no longer a necessity, whether or not it is essential the hearth has still a special place in many homes.

   Now at the turn of the year I wish you

  the warmth of a brightly burning fire

  as these lengthening winter days pass.

  I wish for you health and contentment in the coming year.

I had hoped to be home by now however the Irish weather has had other ideas and the roads are still very dangerous in places.  We have been in touch with a neighbour who advised us not to attempt the journey unless we really need to.  It is starting to feel as though I really need to…

We have been staying with different family members, first a week near a beach which was lovely and since then with an elderly parent. I have to say that Christmas was lovely, very peaceful and calm and christmassy, the ground sparkling in the hard frost…

It’s just that after awhile, no matter how gracious your welcome, it is good to go home…

It happens each year without fail. Despite this my knitting skills have not really improved very much.

I tend to knit simple things like scarves that require no pattern and I don’t have to worry about tension – other than my tension if I drop a stitch!

This winter I am trying a baby blanket for the impending birth of my second grand-child. I am using cotton yarn so that itching the wee baby’s delicate skin won’t be a problem.

I found a great free website for baby blanket patterns. In fact there are lots of wonderful free knitting patterns out there on the internet, just google free knitting pattern followed by your chosen project – for example free knitting pattern baby blanket.

I decided to see if I could improve my knitting technique so I went to the vast storage library of all skills – YouTube.

I found an amazing video of what looked like a very simple and fast technique for knitting.

I have tried this continental knitting method for a whole evening and although I am able to do it I find that I am still very slow and that I feel stressed so I have gone back to my own method for the moment.

There is at least one knitting group in the Leitrim/Roscommon area that meets in Carrick On Shannon every few weeks. I will try to go along to the next meeting.

Meanwhile, I will keep on knitting, one stitch at time…

It was like a winters evening, I lit the fire about 5pm, himself put a chicken in the oven.  I read as the wind blew around us and the rain pelted against the windows.

About an hour forty five minutes later I put my favourite cast iron pot on the stove-top and threw in some chopped leeks & raisins as the oil was heating. Then I added some cajun spice and a cup of basmati rice and stirred to mix well and warm through, adding two and a half cups of water to simmer while I read some more.

I wasn’t just catching up on blogs, I was also browsing real estate websites – not something I was expecting to be doing right now. Some family circumstances are changing and it is possible that we may move instead of building.

Nothing is certain yet however we are having a look to see what is available. To be honest I am finding the prices a bit ridiculous and I believe that already they are lower than they would have been some months ago and will probably keep dropping.

Thank goodness for the grounding effects of a lovely roast chicken dinner!

I loved St Patricks Day when I was a child, for starters we had a day off school which was always a cause for celebration in my book! Secondly, even thought we were in the middle of Lent we were allowed a free day – we could eat the things we had given up for lent such as Tayto crisps, sweets and ice-cream. Thirdly, we lived near a city which always had an exciting parade and it was fun to go watch it with our family and to meet friends there too.

Drinking alcohol was not a big thing in my family so my childhood memories of the day do not involve seeing people drink to excess and as I grew older it was not something that I associated with the day.

I found it a little boring when my college friends got “rat-arsed” on paddys day, although I was a party goer most other days of the year, I never could see the whole “it’s paddys day, we have to get extremely drunk” thing.

I am looking forward to the parade in one of the towns that I live near. It will be a lovely simple affair with tractors, both new and vintage, hopefully the fire brigade truck, the playschool kids in colourful costumes, brownies and cub scouts looking so proud. How do I know what to expect? Because it has been the same for the years that I have lived here and I really do enjoy it!

As I said, when I grew up we had access to quite sophisticated parades and they were great fun and very colourful and noisy with all sorts of marching bands, big fancy floats and often American bands with cheerleaders.

There is something really lovely for me in the simplicity of the local small town parade, it seems more real, more rooted in the community, not trying to be something that it is not.

Many people are happy to go and watch their local parade and then have a pint or two with their friends and neighbours and I do enjoy that sort of socialising and may well do that very thing today.

However I will leave early so as not to be in town this evening when it becomes messy and also because I want to cook a lovely meal of bacon and cabbage! – Yeah, I know, it’s a little cliché but I do love bacon and cabbage and today is a really good day for it!

What does St Patick’s Day mean to you? Whatever it represents I do hope that you have a lovely day and enjoy some fun with your family, friends and neighbours this week.

No, I don’t mean Billy the Kid or the Great Train Robbers, what I mean by out-laws is that we now have the assorted ex-in-laws.

We have our own ex-in-laws, if there are children involved and we are lucky we may have a reasonable relationship with them. Then we have not only our new partner’s family – the in-laws, we have the ex-in-laws and that relationship in whatever state it is. To top that we now also have our siblings’ ex-in-laws and possibly new in-laws as well. Phew, who has a big enough table for that family gathering?

With the best will in the world it is hard to maintain good relationships with all these new “relations”. Family responsibilities may become very confused and boundaries are ever more difficult to maintain – ah! There is the “wild west” motif sneaking in again – fence wars, boundary problems!

For many of us healthy boundaries within our immediate family may be quite enough to concentrate on, let’s face it – not many of us learned about healthy boundaries whilst growing up. By immediate family here I mean our partner and whatever children we may have between us, for some even this distinction is not clear.

I recently had a conversation with a sibling who assumed that by immediate family I meant my siblings, I was quite shocked and so was my sibling. You can imagine the conversation – sibling: but we are your family; me: yes, of course you are still my family, I now have a bigger family and more immediate family priorities with my partner and my partners children; sibling: where do we come in?; me: I actually left that unanswered and I’m still trying to figure it out, hopefully my sibling is also giving the matter some thought…

Family responsibilities are not clear and easy to deal with for many people and now with all the added family it has become even more difficult.

It may be the case that because of a particular skill you possess you may have taken on the role of doing certain jobs or having certain responsibilities within your first in-law family. When divorce or separation enters the picture that role may not be as clear as it was.

It may be that you wish to continue providing that skill to the now ex-family and there is resentment coming from others in that family, on the other hand perhaps you would prefer to keep very clear boundaries and withdraw from that level of family involvement and other family members resent you for doing that!

It’s even worse if there is simmering resentments or bitterness in the out-law family, not necessarily from your ex, sometimes these resentments come from your ex’s siblings and that can be very difficult to deal with. These feeling can sift downward in the generations, perhaps becoming exaggerated as they do and then affect the children no matter what age they are.

Even trying to write that is confusing, never mind actually trying to live it. Think I will put the kettle on and have a nice cup of tea.

I hope your day is not filled with confusion…