White Christmas

Hope everyone had a relaxing Christmas or failing relaxing an enjoyable one !

According to the Bablake weather station , which is a great local weather station based at a school, this was one of only 3 years in the last 40 where there has been snow on the ground on Christmas day on Coventry!

I went out late morning to clear the path and decided that it was far to nice a day, cold but sunny and quite warm really, well compared to the last couple of weeks and so I announced Christmas lunch was going to be at tea time and we were going to the woods ! It seemed as nature had given us a White Christmas we should make the most of it!!

I have used one of the photos I took as a background. I don't generally like patterned backgrounds to text but I Hope I have muted the middle section enough to make this readable.

Here are a few more.

 Walking in the woods

Hide and Seek !!

Daddy shoulders are great when you have run out of energy!

 Silhouette from the low winter sun!

A busy time of year but no posts

This time if year I make things but can't post them as they are Christmas presents and some of them I have given away without photographing but after Christmas I hope to put up some posts about such things.

In the meantime it has been a very early winter in the UK. Much more snow and low temperatures than normal and my parsnips are firmly frozen in the ground when normal you would expect to be able to go and dig them for Christmas dinner. The tradition of planting garlic and onions on boxing day seems unlikely to.

According to the Bablake weather Station the lowest mean temperature for December until this year was -0.1°C in 1981 and currently we are standing at an average this month of -0.8°C so unless it really warms up over the next week or so this looks like a record breaking cold December!

One thing we haven't had much of is snow. well compared to the rest of the country anyway. We have snow and that's un-usual enough before Christmas but places both North and South of us are seriously effected by it where as we just have a small amount making things look white !  We did have enough the boys got to go sledging a couple of days ago but so far we seem to have managed to be on the edge of off a snow clouds so we have just got a bit here and there whichever side of us the main area of snow has been.

Great Tit

One thing we have been making sure we do is keep the bird feeders stocked up. Our regulars include sparrows, blue tits, great tits, coal tits, collared doves, squirrels, a nuthatch and possibly dunucks though we arn't sure on those, they look rather like sparrows at times. I think I've spotted a wren a couple of times too but again it's flighty and keeps mostly out of the way.

nuthatch