This year Chris and I decided to embrace the Icelandic celebration of Christmas Eve and exchange books or Jolabokaflod, literally Christmas Book Flood!!
This is a lovely tradition where people give each other books on Christmas Eve and spend the evening reading them. This certainly appealed to us!
Our books all had a Christmas theme, and I was delighted to receive Noel Streatfeild's recently published Christmas Stories, as well as a beautiful edition of Carol Ann Duffy's Christmas Poems. There were a number of other books including some murder mysteries and a fascinating book about the season of Winter entitled Wintering.
We spent a peaceful evening enjoying our spoils and getting into a very festive mood. In Iceland Jolabokaflod includes cocoa, but as neither of us likes cocoa we substituted mulled wine, and very nice it was, too.