Photo: maggie320 on Flickr

Even without the guided bus I have managed to do about half my Christmas shopping before December, this is probably the first time that I will have had all my shopping done in good time. It does make for a much more relaxed & enjoyable holiday season.

I am always reminded how lucky I am to have such a great Christmas, I get a long break from work and spend Christmas eve & morning with my friends (Mark & Family) where I not only get woken up very early by the kids but am treated (in some respects) as a child & a member of the family. I get a stocking and have to open it with the kids on the bed before being allowed into the living room where there is a mad scramble for presents, being filmed all the while for prosperity. I was recently reminded of this when being shown a video from a few years ago, eek.

This year looks as though this is unlikely to change, Christmas eve will consist of a lovely pub lunch at the Pig & Abbot in Abington Piggots with my parents and brother, back to my parents for the afternoon, drop of all the presents and off to Marks.

Christmas Eve at Marks is now a tradition where we will of course watch “Ground Hog Day”, “Trapped in Paradise”, one of the “Santa Clause” films, “Miracle on 34th Street” and anything else that we feel fits the evening, all coupled with probably way too much too eat. At about midnight-ish I will be called to go and collect the eldest daughter, Leanne, from whichever pub she has ended up in, which is a fairly new tradition that I seem to have acquired due to my giving up alcohol a few years ago. Generally around this time, we also see what appears to be Santa or Mrs Claus on their rounds, I think they give up waiting for us to go to bed, depositing goodie bags as they go. We consider going to bed.

Morning arrives, a little too early for my liking, with the sounds of girls footsteps in the hallway. I’m awoken by the sound of “Are you awake?”, “No” comes the response, we start to open our stockings.

A queue outside the living room door marks the start of the chaos of Christmas morning, ordered by height I used to be second from the back (Mark being 6’3″) but now having moved up a spot because his younger brother, Paul, outgrew me. Itching to go we wait for the door to open..

I never quite know which is more exciting, the opening of presents, watching others open their presents, watching Chico go bananas, being amused at Sheila attempting to open my wrapping or the inevitable wrapping paper fight – it all makes me smile.

By the way, I’m 36 and love Christmas Morning.

I’m just glad that our TV channels don’t put up such annoying items (yet), it’s bad enough with the channel tag alone.

Firstly, the applications have been moved from the bottom bar, which itself has just become the “chat bar”, to the side menu on the “Home Page” ONLY! I can’t see how that is possibly an improvement. There is significant space left on the top bar to have added a new drop-down menu with exactly the same content. You also cannot re-arrange the order in which the applications appear, they seem to have come across in whatever order you previously had them and that’s all you can have.

The wall menu seems to have become automatic, if you scroll to the bottom and wait for a couple of seconds it will auto load older messages. This is very irritating if you are trying to click any of the links (i.e. to change the language!!)

Previously, if an application sent a notification it would appear to pop-up from the bar at the bottom (in the right-hand corner) where the “notifications” icon was. Now it appears in the bottom left corner for no obvious reason for about 2 seconds, and if you miss it you will have to load all the notifications to see those “sent by me”!

Hopefully these “little” annoyances will be set right soon, but it is pretty poor that they were allowed to get to this stage….

My track record for this sort of game would normally be to play as often and as hard as I can for as long as possible, and then decide that its not worth the hassle. I am hoping that I can curtail some of those traits and treat it with a bit more indifference, and not caring that my friends are doing much better than me….

Well, it looks like my plans to do some Christmas shopping using the Guided Bus has gone south…. The council have now confirmed that the opening of the £116m bus route will not happen in 2009. I wonder if I can count on it for 2010?

I have for the first time in many years started my Christmas shopping before the end of November, not sure it was best to start on Friday 13th but it’s better than Christmas eve Maybe I’ll be a little more relaxed in the days before and be able to try the Guided Bus (if it opens) into Cambridge to avoid trying to park!

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