A bit of Christmas planning

So school has finally broken up and I am free to think about Christmas cooking... not that I haven't been thinking about it a lot recently. There is a plethora of cookery programmes on tv at the moment, and I have been quite inspired by Jamie's Family Christmas. I'm not normally a big fan of Jamie, being more of a Nigella girl myself, but his recipes on that programme do look pretty good.

I've not been doing much cooking this week due to several Christmas lunches and Tim cooking, but I have made the Christmas cake, which is sutting in a tin and ready to be marzipanned and iced next week. I also made some Christmas biscuits but I didn't ice them so I didn't think they were worth photographing.

I did, however, think it was worth photographing our Christmas tree - I am quite obsessed with it, and spend a good couple of hours decorating it last Saturday.

Over the Christmas holidays, I want to do lots of cooking. We are planning to have Goose on Christmas day, and have most of the normal trimmings - roast potatoes, sprouts, cranberry sauce, bread sauce, carrots, pigs-in-blankets... I do still need to make the Christmas pudding. Tim won one after doing an 11k run last Sunday, but I don't think it's quite nice enough! I love bread sauce, and I love making it, infusing the milk with a clove-studded onion, soaking the breadcrumbs... delicious. I should make it more often than just at Christmas!

But I also want to do some Christmas periphery stuff - braised red cabbage for the goose, a chestnut dessert, Christmas muffins, Christmas popcorn... Plus there's also biscuits for cheese, chutneys, pickles... Maybe I'm being a little ambitious.

There's a lot I want to do in the house this Christmas too as it will be our first Christmas as a married couple. We are at home for Christmas day, and so I want it gleaming and organised. The spare room has turned into a bit of a nightmare - as well as having our desk and laundry in there, it also houses boxes which have yet to be unpacked, and the cat is trying to take over the bed. So I want to blitz the spare room and also the stairs down to the cellar, which are very dark, dusty and a little bit spooky. This is the first school holiday I've had living here - we were on our honeymoon over half term - and I tend to put off home jobs until holidays!

Finally, I have to find some desserts for New Years Eve - we are having a murder mystery party, set in France at the end of WW2... so far I'm thinking of a chocolate mousse, but I also need something else. Suggestions please?