Joyeux Noël et merci

The sun came back yesterday after two weeks of truly hideous weather - the kind of misty rain that penetrates everywhere even though it's not very heavy,  grey skies, no light. So in my manic gratitude I cleaned the house (instead of marzipanning the cakes, baking walnut puffs and wrapping treats) right down to the shells and stones and marbles!

I polished floors and furniture with beeswax polish and while dusting pots and sculpture and paintings thought of the friends who made them. I like the reflective nature of this time of year.

We like to put the tree up on Christmas Eve but at the weekend we realised that the shops were running out so Warb  had a frantic search for one yesterday. Happily he got the very last tree in the Aveyron - a huge one that takes up most of the sitting room and today I got the very last organic free range chicken in the supermarket - someone is smiling on us! The vegetarians (4 out of 6 of us!) will be having mushroom and blue cheese pie (I'll post the recipe sometime - it's a really good one).

I want to  thank everyone who has bought something from A Brown Paper Parcel this past year.  I really enjoy every aspect of it - finding things, finding out about things, the relationships I have developed with dealers and house clearers (interesting characters!), the stories I've heard, the Summer Sunday mornings at the Brocante at the crack of dawn and then back home photographing and listing items and hearing from you!  

Etsy is quite amazing I think. Incredibly simple, organised and user friendly both for buyers and sellers and allowing people like me to have a tiny little business, run from a house in a field in the middle of nowhere, which is nevertheless international! To my customers in the United States, Australia, Denmark, Singapore, Israel, England, Wales and France, Hong Kong, Italy, Russia and Slovenia...

Happy Christmas and all best wishes for 2015!

Méabh

ps. and Germany - how did I miss out Germany? Happy Christmas Sigrid!

villefranche graffiti

I'm not usually a fan of graffiti and I definitely don't like tagging - 

I really don't see the point - but whoever is doing the work above in Villefranche isn't doing a bad job!  He (I get the feeling it's a he) doesn't paint on walls or on property that is lived in. There's a huge number of abandoned and derelict houses in Villefranche. (The council is on to it, grants are available and it's being dealt with but still it's slow going). 

There's another person who has an even  less invasive approach who draws on large sheets of newsprint and then wallpaper pastes them on to doors, shutters etc. Very considerate! I'll take some photos of those too.