patrícia furtado

“I’m getting too old for this, sighs Santa, as he pulls yet another all-nighter to finish the online shopping for those annoying last-minute Dear-Santa emails.”

While still working on a shinny new website for my friend and amazing ceramics conservator and restorer Inês Feliciano, I came up with a very simple idea for this year’s e-mail Christmas card.

It’s a classic, people always complain about receiving socks for Christmas. Well, not me. I love new socks, and I count on the Christmas bounty to replace the worn-till-toe-peaking-out pairs and the missing-in-action-lonely-divorcees (by the way, does anyone know where my socks go when they leave their better halves?).

But as good as this year’s loot was, I couldn’t help but to feel slightly disappointed in the end, when there were no socks to be accounted for. Among all the beautiful scarves, interesting stuff to wear, to read, to cook in, whatever happened to the reliable socks?

It wasn’t just me, this year’s event proved overall poor in socks. With 13 people present, I only saw one lonely pair pop out of wrapping. It was however a night for pijamas, with 7 of them being offered throughout the night. And thankfully, one was destined to be mine.

Still, Christmas isn’t what it used to be. No socks. Sad, really. What saved it for me, though, was my cute adorable little niece, dressed up for the occasion, and always happy and excited about everything. Who cares about presents when you’ve got that to play with?

When I offered to create some recipes for the Copella website Christmas page, I mainly had desserts in mind. When Rob, from enotions, suggested I could do an Apple soup, I was a bit concerned about the results, because I had never even tasted one.

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For the Copella fruit juices website Christmas update, I was asked to create a series of printable goodies, such as greeting cards, gift tags, table settings, shopping and to do lists… and recipes. All with the traditional Copella feel, lots of apples and Christmasy decoration and a bit of the season’s quirkiness and chaos.

The recipes were particularly fun to do, because I’m so obsessed with food. I ended up creating, cooking and photographing them, as well as designing the recipe cards. I will be posting them on the Recipe Book soon, but meanwhile please visit the Copella website and grab them now.

Some more photos of our FBAUL Xmas dinner… the actual Christmasy bit of the night: the presents. Note how we managed to convince Mafalda that her present was going to blow up in her face.

… where our small group of university friends exchanges a gazillion e-mails back and forth, finally finds a date where we are all available, agree on a restaurant, and gather around some food exchanging gossip, gifts and old anecdotes.

This year the we had a new addition, the first baby in the group, the gorgeous António Maria. Congratulations, Quicas! Who’s next, then, ladies? (Not me…)