Christmas at the Farmhouse - Rebecca Boxall Page 0,2

Wells and often come to stay for Christmas, though this year they’re going to be with Magnus’s younger sister in Copenhagen.

Magnus isn’t remotely negative, despite his ‘resting miserable face’ as the children call it (‘I can’t help having a downward turning mouth!’ he always tells them), but he’s somewhat more realistic than me.

He looked at me intently. ‘Will you at least talk to all the children? Give them some tasks to do so that Christmas isn’t completely down to you this year? And I’ll do my fair share too. Let’s make a list.’

I perked up a bit at this. I like lists a lot: a legacy from years of running a large household. Magnus got up from the table and found a notepad and biro then sat back down again, putting on his reading glasses. I took a sip of tea.

‘Presents,’ he wrote down first.

‘Oh, all sorted. Ages ago!’

‘You’re not doing stockings this year, are you?’ Magnus asked, peering above the rim of his glasses. ‘The children have their own children now! It’s crazy!’

‘Freja doesn’t!’

‘Okay, just Freja then. Agreed?’

I sighed. ‘Oh alright, agreed.’ It would save me a lot of time on Christmas Eve or the day before, when I usually kneel on the sitting room carpet and wrap every single little gift for four grown adults to receive from Father Christmas.

‘Food,’ he wrote next. ‘Couldn’t we get each of the kids to bring a course, or something? And I’ll sort out the cheese.’ Magnus is obsessed with cheese. ‘And the drink.’

‘You’d better speak to Mikkel about the wine though,’ I advised. ‘You know he has firm ideas on the subject nowadays.’ We exchanged knowing smiles, needing to say no more on the topic. Mikkel, our eldest (and a complete replica of Magnus to look at), is a very particular sort of person and has been since he was a toddler. ‘Anally retentive’ the other children call him, rather meanly, though I’m sure his fastidious behaviour serves him very well in his job as a laboratory analyst. He’s a great one for research – there’s nothing the man doesn’t know about IVF since the birth of his twin girls. He and Belle really went through the mill with that and they’re only young, Mikkel thirty and Belle thirty-three, but she suffered an ectopic pregnancy before the twins, which made IVF their only option. Anyway, currently, following a two-week summer holiday in Provence, Mikkel’s latest interest is wine.

Lucas, our second born, is a different kettle of fish. It’s as though all Magnus’s Danish ways were passed to him and he’s managed to bypass any sort of British neurosis: he’s an affable outdoor boy, mad about animals, who used to spend every winter season skiing and showed no signs of settling down until he met horsey Heidi during an après-ski session and before we knew it he was married, living in Gloucestershire, and spending most of his time mucking out horses. Heidi is an accountant – very successful – but not the most natural of mothers. She gave birth to a little girl a few months ago and – though I hate to sound critical, there’s no other way to say it – is making an absolute meal of it.

Not that I would ever think to offer advice without being asked. That lesson I learnt from Astrid, our older daughter, a radio broadcaster and mother of a two-year-old boy, who’s also a ‘Mummy blogger’ and doesn’t pull any punches when writing blogs about – and I quote – ‘interfering mothers who dish out unwanted advice’. This may have been the cause of my explosion on Christmas Day last year.

‘Decorations,’ Magnus said next, bringing me back to the present, and smiling at the thought of decorating the house for Christmas – something we’re both passionate about. ‘I was thinking this year we should get two trees – one for the sitting room and one for the entrance hall.’

The list making might have gone on all day were it not for the sudden arrival of Freja, who slammed the back door behind her and came blustering into the kitchen looking pink-cheeked from the cold and very pretty, if under-dressed for the weather, in a floral tea-dress worn with tights that matched the latest shade of her heavily fringed purple bob.

‘Freja! We haven’t seen you in ages! How are you?’ I asked. A simple question though the answer could have been anything from ‘amazing’ to ‘appalling’ and any number of variations in between. What I