With the New Year celebrations behind us, and my backlog of blog posts growing fast, I’ve finally managed to edit the hundreds of photographs we took during our Cornish Christmas last week.

You may remember I was lucky enough to win Christmas week at Coombe Mill with a little video – and the week was everything I hoped it would be, and more.  I have so many photos, I’m going to take a few posts to remember the holiday – so I’ll start with the reason we were there – Christmas!   We immediately got in the mood on arriving at Coombe Mill, finding a big Christmas Tree in our cottage and a box of decorations for us to use – so we set the children to work while we unpacked.

On our first full day on the farm, the weekly kids activity hour had a very Christmassy theme to it – with the children making and decorating little elf post boxes:

While they were drying, Farmer Fiona took the children to Coombe Mill’s fairy garden where they met a friendly Elf who helped them collect some special reindeer food and who told a Christmassy story, before they all enjoyed some toasted marshmallows!

Coombe Mill’s Fiona captured the festive activity hour with this cute video:

Coombe Mill kept the Christmassy vibe going with a lovely Christmas Eve.  In the late afternoon, all the farm guests gathered at the little railway for a special Christmas express train service where the children met Santa in the beautifully decorated tunnel and were given gifts – they were so excited and it was such a lovely touch!

You can see how excited Alex was in the second of Fiona’s Christmas videos here!

The Christingle Service and wonderful drinks party and fireworks were such a great build up to Christmas Eve – we loved spending time with the other guests and the Coombe Mill team before settling down to our family evening.  Back in the cottage, we left out goodies for Santa (who Alex had reminded that we were on holiday and not at home every time he’d seen a Santa in December!) on the lovely plates Jacqui, our childminder, had given Alex and Sophie.

Thankfully, the day’s activities had left the children exhausted, so they were asleep quickly, leaving us time to get ready for Christmas Day and then relax around the wonderful, warm fire.

Christmas morning thankfully started after 7am for Family Agar with the children bounding in with their stockings, hopeful of receiving some chocolate coins.

After some quiet family time unwrapping gifts and getting started on some lego construction, we headed out on the daily farm feed fun, with Farmer Nick dressed as Santa driving the tractor!  It was great being out in the fresh air, getting muddy and enjoying the animals.

The rest of Christmas Day was very peaceful – we pottered around enjoying carols from King’s, enjoying a fine brunch, reading and playing.  With our turkey in the oven, we made the most of our location by heading out on an afternoon walk around the farm and beyond.  We didn’t get far – there were just too many muddy puddles to jump in and animals to stop and say hello to (below, Alex thought the pigs might like to see some Christmas bubbles!) – but we did head out of the farm into the local woods for a bit of an explore.

When we got back to the cottage, we made the final touches to the cooking and then settled down for a our Christmas meal together.  I’d been really nervous about doing a full turkey meal with all the trimmings in an unfamiliar kitchen, but thankfully it worked out really well and lunch was delicious.

We rounded off the day with a bizarre racing Santa game which had come from our crackers – surreal but very good fun!

It was a wonderful Christmas Day – calm, family-focused, delicious with a lot of time outdoors – and almost no phones/laptops in sight!  Everything I’d hoped for from a Coombe Mill Christmas!

More tomorrow about what we got up to during our week in Cornwall…