Happy Christmas

I’d like to wish you all a Happy Christmas and a day filled with peace, health and hope.

Please know that everyone who connects to this little social bridge is very special to me and thanks to you my thoughts are sailing around the globe as I write this.

Santa spent his time trying to get me to improve my geographical knowledge beyond the North Pole by bringing big spinning globes, jig-saws of the world, books about great explorers, picture books of The Wonders of the World, songs ( records) of musicians from the most exotic places and about the most exotic places ….. But, what he didn’t fully get was that I needed to connect with real people from those places, like him and the North Pole, in order to get my head around where places are.

YOU, dear friends, are these special people who bring places alive and make my heart sing.

I send my love to you all this precious day from my beloved Tramore, here on the south-east coast of Ireland.

Tramore Bay, Co. Waterford

The Dawning ~ Gatherings from Ireland # 326

I’m sure you all know that feeling of  the dawning ~ the moment when reality strikes on waking. It can be a waking to dreaded realisation that the nightmare was more than that, far more than that – a horror that has to faced, somehow, anyhow.

Or, it can be joy-filled, as on all those Christmas mornings when you know that the day has finally arrived and you sense that Santa has woven his magic, yet again.

When I woke this morning, my first thought was about those Santa mornings  and the red straw shopping bag with frayed plastic lining that I used to leave at the bottom of my bed year after year after year …..  I don’t know whatever happened to the red bag that I associate so much with Enid Blyton books, bath salts, green boxes of six pristine white Dunlop tennis balls,  doggy diaries …..

And what of the precious things that didn’t fit into the red bag?  The big box with the roller-skates I craved; the chemistry set bursting with experiments and danger; Bandit Chase with speedy cars, blaring sirens, highways and fly-overs that were a far cry from the roads of Co. Monaghan in the 1960s and, of course, Elephant who once had wheels and a rope for me to pull but who cast those off long ago as he came to watch over me in the various studies I’ve made my own.

I’m pretty stunned that these were my dawning thoughts today as I thought I had left Christmas behind somewhere but maybe one never does …..