Let Love Continue.

Valentine's Day was this week.  There are many ways to approach this holiday (great joy, great grumpiness, ignore it altogether), but I love to use it as an excuse to enjoy beauty in things red, white, and sparkling.

One of my favourite things to do is have the girls over for a beautiful dinner, so we did that again this year, softening the lights in the flat and laying out little tea-light candles everywhere.  (You'll notice the Scottish flag still is a prominent feature!)

Partly to make it simple, and partly because we love it so much, our Valentine's Dinner came from the famous Boodle Bar.  So our table was set with chopsticks, as well as roses, carnations, floating candles, and cut glass goblets. 

 

 

 

For a while we just stood and looked at it.  Hayley was so excited before I opened the door to reveal the beauty within that she was leaping around gasping 'I can't stand it! I'm almost afraid!'

But she came round to the beautiful flowers....

 ...as did we all.

Afterwards we pulled out our 2010 goal lists and reviewed them all (with a little hilarity and great congratulations for those who had achieved theirs), and sat down to write out our 2011 goals.  A little belated, but we'd rather do it in February and mean it than join the madding crowds in January and be giving up by now. We're just getting started!

The girls and I had resolved to write out reading lists for 2011, so after we wrote those, we re-discovered Alice in Wonderland in my bookcase and sat reading it aloud to each other.  One of my favourite quotes of all time comes from Lewis Carroll's book:

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things: of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages - and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot -and whether pigs have wings."

May you find beauty in all these things!