Every year on the 26th of December, I wake up feeling as though I should be singing Edelweiss. It's one of my favourite days in the calendar. Christmas is over, the year stretches out ahead, clean and bright, and I am very happy to greet it.
There is a wonderful feeling of freedom, freshness, and opportunity. Christmas acts as a plug in the annual cycle, and once it has been pulled, the year can flow again. For me, Boxing Day is the best bit of the season...
...along with eating home-grown chillis on Christmas Day (picked on Christmas Eve), experimenting with nail art, reading Cherry and the wonderful account of Christmas in the Antarctic, watching 'Downton Abbey' return to form (you could almost hear the pantomime-style audience participation up and down the country as Matthew got a cold knee), and enjoying a brilliantly weird Fritz Lang film which mixed up Freud, Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester, and Blue Beard to great effect.
And now it's time to get out and about. Lots to do, lots to look forward to.
