A week already?

It has been a frantic week - which is good from one point of view as at least I'm selling books, which all helps. Lovely though it is to have shelves of immaculate and expensive books, the Co-Op are strangely reluctant to take them, preferring good hard cash, so it's handy that the immaculate-but-expensive (as well as the used-and-cheaper) are being converted into cash. If this year's like any other, it will be frantic up until the middle of next week, when trade will suddenly die. Any orders there are will usually be by telephone, and the people who place them will start to have that stressed urgency in their voices which doesn't generally surface the rest of the year. Just before Christmas it is quiet, quiet, quiet, but the thing I have found over the last couple of years is that I get a lot of good orders over the Christmas period itself.

I have a few theories over why this is: people haven't got what they wanted or hinted for, so are making good now; they've decided to treat themselves as a reward for putting up with their vile relatives or are in holiday mood and have decided to indulge themselves. Still I don't mind why they order as long as they do, and a book is a lot less fattening than all those Christmas goodies. And love food though I do, I get fleetingly irritated by the way stuff I normally buy in the supermarket moves to accommodate a whole load of stuff I know we will never eat (yes, Waitrose, that's you). The Co-Op, I have to say, is much better and manages to integrate the Christmas stuff into its normal stock.

Although my son's and daughter's chocolate consumption shoots up to danger levels over Christmas, generally we don't eat much more than we normally do, and I would love to know if people actually do eat all that extra food. Every year I buy one of those rather nice boxes of chocolate biscuits from M&S and we're always so sodden with food (1001 ways of getting through the turkey.....) we don't actually eat the biscuits until well into January.

I am, however, very much looking forward to my sister's Christmas cake which last year was fantastic.... Eating Christmas cake chez Badger though is a strange affair involving careful dissection. My daughter doesn't like the cake so I eat hers, I don't like marzipan so my husband eats mine, which he will generally swap for the icing. Son wisely avoids the whole thing.

I am wavering off the point, though, so will stop.