23. I saw Mummy kissing Vassili??????

So that's Christmas over and done with again; and it was different, to say the least.

Sitting in the sunshine outside a bar in Parga on Xmas Eve afternoon was surreal. According to the locals, the spell of warm weather we enjoyed was unusual and not good for the olive crop, which is now in full swing, but there were no complaints from us.

Christmas in this part Greece is a much lower key affair than it is in the UK , demonstrated by the fact that on our shopping trip a few days before Xmas day we ambled around crowd free supermarkets. No queueing ten deep at the checkout for us this year, although we did have to wait for 10 minutes for the cashier to appear! It was just as well that we didn't have to fight to get to the shelves as our Xmas shopping list was a challenge.

We had planned to have a quiet day with the traditional full Xmas dinner and a parcel from the UK was supposed to provide our stock of Quality Street, Terry's Chocolate Orange etc. and the all important Paxo stuffing, but this failed to arrive. We already had a homemade Xmas Pud, potatoes for the "Roasties" and carrots were not going to be a problem, but we had never seen sprouts here, and stuffing for a bird was not something we were going to try to describe to a supermarket aisle filler with our limited Greek.

The turkey was easy, fresh ones on sale at reasonable prices; however, as these all weighed in at 6 kilos plus, we opted for a 3 kilo frozen bird, which in all probability would still provide a curry, several days of sandwiches and soup for the week after. Interestingly the turkey was from Germany and was very tasty, a case of "Vorsprung Durch Turknich" if ever there was one!

To our amazement, on Xmas Eve we found a large bag of sprouts (the rest were frozen) in a local greengrocers and an English neighbour took pity on us and provided the stuffing; so that was that; Xmas dinner with all the trimmings, with no hassle or fuss. The only things missing on the day were the Queen's Speech, the chocolates and "The Great Escape" on TV!!

Santa or Father Christmas here is called Vassili; I've tried going through all the Xmas songs/carols that have "Santa" in there somewhere but I can't come up with one that you can substitute with Vassili. Suggestions invited!!!!