Abubilla Music

The Christmas Season Kicks Off

Written by Jimmy

Our Christmas was official last night – the annual X-mas party, the arrival of extraordinary Christmas Carolers and the first of many viewings of Love Actually….

For last 15 years, we’ve held a Christmas party.  For all of those years, it’s been a family affair, with roughly 50 kids (they all started as under threes and have grown from there), and a kids’ entertainer.  Our gift to friends was the clown/magician/juggler would keep the kids occupied for at least 90 minutes so we could talk … like adults.   One year, we had a juggler, who was juggling knifes and burning torches — so scary, that we had him do his show outside in the cold with kids’ noses pressed from the inside against the window.   50 kids watched the juggler, perched on two chairs on top of each other, juggling knifes, fall off the porch and into the garden.  Such fun.   He recovered after a bit.  Well, this year was the first party without an entertainer – the kids are all 15-18 now.  So no entertainer and the kids all gathered in groups of 5-7 playing drinking games around the house.  Sigh.  Bring back the clowns or the juggling guy.

Party was over and Anthony and the Carolers arrived while we were just settling into Love Actually.   Anthony (Louise’s dad) and Caroline assembling a big group of actor friends and go out singing.    And they brought Ceci and Annie — two of the girls singing chorus in Sandy and the Sleeping Bag (Annie is the voice of:  ‘is it too late to sing now?’ that closes track).  And this isn’t jingle bells singing, this is proper full on choir doing some pretty fancy stuff.  Absolutely fantastic.  We invited them all in and let them finish off the remains of punch (1/2 bottle vodka, 2 cartons OJ, 1 carton Pineapple, Cranbury, 1 bottle ginger ale) and food from the party and were treated to three magificient songs.   I desparately tried to pull them into the studio to finally do the ‘chanting bit’ to 71 Hours to Monday (the passive aggressive band continues to fight against this!) but couldn’t turn Pro Tools on fast enough, as Anthony shoveled them out the door to the next house.   Sigh.   Passed out CD’s to all of them as they ran out, somewhat perplexed, and begged them to come ’round for chanting.  They looked at Anthony a bit sternly and I imagine there was a discussion about avoiding our house in future.   One of them put an ‘X’ on our door — St Kathy was seen trying to remove it this morning.

On their departure we started up Love Actually again, and watched thru the end.  Poor Kathy wanted to go to bed but we convinced her there were only two more minutes (look, Mum, the Prime Minister has kissed the girl with big thighs – we just need to wrap up Colin Firth and the little drummer  boy and it’s bedtime).  As she does every year, she believed us, and suffered thru another 30 minutes (we hadn’t told her that Emma Thompson still had to tell off the bad guy from Die Hard and the BT boy needed to have wild sex with Jack’s daughter in 24.  If you follow this, you’re our kind of reader!).

So with party, carols and Love Actually, we are finally officially in the Christmas mood.    We hope you are getting in the spirit as well.  Here’s to the next 7 viewings of Love Actually and the Gavin And Stacey Christmas Special.

Jimmy