Advocaat

A long time since my last post, but this for me unChristmassy of Christmas Eve's - no decorations in the house, no cooking smells wafting from room to room has just been made that extra Christmassy by buying a bottle of Advocaat.

A Facebook friend mentioned that he had bought some and had been drinking snowballs. So I went out and bought some too.

It now stands unopened in the kitchen, waiting to be mixed with some Lemonade, and i will be whisked back to my childhood.

Most of my Christmas Eve memories as a child take me back to my great Aunt's house. The Christmas shopping would have been all but finished, and mother was now looking for dad in some pub or other after he work Christmas dinner had finished. The next few hours I would spend inflating balloons, untangling ancient lights and unravelling equally ancient tinsel. I would then prop my self up on a piano stool and my Aunt would poor me some advocaat. It's gloopy yellowness being both scary and exciting and exotic. I never remember finishing a glass so I never got drunk - which is good as , I was not yet in Secondary school when this started - my mother claims to be totally unaware that I was plied with alcohol as a Primary school aged child.

This sort of became a tradition for a few years until I hit my teens , when I stayed at home during the parental pub crawl, and made do with babycham, and then when I was 16 I just did what other school kids did in West Wales in mid to late 1980's, went to the pub and indulged in underaged illegal drinking.

Soon however I will open that bottle and drinking to the memory of my great Aunt.