26-12-2006 Boxing Day

We have done many varied things, over the years, on boxing day. But this is the very first time that we have spent a big proportion of the day outside picking olives in the warm sunshine. It’s a glorious occupation in total peace and tranquillity. We were going to go down to the olive trees yesterday, but somehow we never quite made it. Today we picked the crop from the fifth out of twelve trees (since we started). We knew that it was well endowed, but I recon that just this one tree has given us another fifteen to twenty kg of olives. This is the amount that we collected on all of the first four trees. I think that this was probably the tree with the most fruit on it out of all of them, so the rest should not take too long to harvest. We spent about three and a half hours down there today.
No signs of anything remotely looking like a JCB today, not even anything yellow has passed us today, hey ho.
Elayne is watching ’White Christmas’ and after writing this blog I will have another cup of tea and perhaps another mince pie (they are Mr Kipling, very nice).
It is interesting that Jeff and Jane down in Benerraba commented on their blog on the fact that a lot of red poinsettias have been planted down there in the town centres. Jeff found it strange because he said that they die off within a few days of planting. We had noticed the same up here although I had not as yet observed that they had started to die off yet. If they do, it must be a special Christmas thing. I’ll try to remember to see them tomorrow when we go to play tennis and report back. It has to be said that they look very spectacular when they put them in.
Pictures: Our poinsettias, that we were given last week at Lidl. Saffy and Pip still enjoying life here in Spain. No JCB on site!!!