Approaching Christmas and where are we up to?

 Five things to be thankful for this Christmas.

We are still here.  We come to the end of 2020 still alive, still living, breathing, laughing, doing, still here.

Ian.  We have come through all these months of uncertainty and confinement together, looking after each other practically and emotionally,  keeping each other company, looking out for each other, enjoying our time together, amusing and occasionally annoying each other but always making each other's lives immeasurably richer.  

Our wider family and friends.  We may not have seen as much of them as we like to do but we have been in touch often and just that sense of them being out there fills me with gratitude: a facetime degenerating into noisy chaos with the younger grandchildren, a call with the adults in the evening, a visit from local daughter and her family.  Knowing that they are there is like a warm fire in winter.

The natural world.  We live in a beautiful place and like to spend a lot of time outside in it.  This year that has been even more important, if that is possible.  A glorious spring carried me along through the worst of the first lockdown.  

And even this last week a visit to Newborough Warren beach in Anglesey left me with a whole series of images and impressions to carry us on over the muddy winter.

I am going to finish with food and drink.  In a world which has shrunk this year the reliable pleasures of food have always delivered: scrambled egg for breakfast, roast chicken filling the kitchen with the smell of home, a glass of wine in the evening.  At the moment I am feeding the Christmas cake and the keeping of small traditions like this is an anchoring thing, a comforting thing.

So there we are.  I could look outward at the rising Welsh coronavirus figures and the likely failure to reach a Brexit trade deal but what would be the point?  Today I will choose to look at the things that I am grateful for.  There are many.

I would love to know what yours are.