Two weeks before Christmas

My gingerbread garland which lasted about an hour  

The mince pie-o-meter in the bakery is starting to climb steeply. Not only do we now have a driver who has immediately become indispensable, but we also have Mary who just focuses on sandwiches and mince pies. We've come a long way from last year.

My new years resolution is definitely to seek help around my Martha Stewart Type A tendencies, which are border-line masochistic when trying to run a commercial bakery.

I really needed to make the Donna Hay Gingerbread Men garland for our bakery Christmas decorations. No Kmart tinsel for us, thank you. Ours is from Anthropologie, no less. I simply cannot help myself.

So I did make the garland - about 5 times in the end. The first lot I burnt. The second lot fell to bits in the humidity and looked like a gingerbread massacre. The third lot got bumped and replaced. Once, twice and then finally thrown in the bin. Sigh.

It has also been a sad week: I've been baking at home with South African radio on, listening to all the tributes for Mandela and the nation in mourning. One never cries for just one loss - sadness seems to well up and accumulate - and so there have also been tears for my own family losses too.

Tuesday 10 December

This has all been interspersed, of course, with being insanely busy along with moments of feeling quite unhinged. I threatened to give the children away on BVI Bring & Buy, less I harmed them, and I also felt like I'd taken up the Japanese sport of motor car drifting as I screamed backwards & forwards up and down slippery, wet island hills - the Simon & Garfunkel "Slow down, you're going to fast di-di-di-deeeeee" song playing on a loop in my noisy head.

So, we're looking forward to a quiet family Christmas and a few days R & R in New York. Tyler has not been off-island for 2.5 years and we all need some bright city lights and someone else doing the cooking.

But until then, it's heads down for mince pies.