Ron Weasley

So, yeah.

I'm all right.

Nev. Thanks, mate. I'll see you in DADA, yeah?

For Christmas!

And Mum's cooking. I mean, here at school you don't ever wake up because you're smelling breakfast cooking, do you? Or know it's time to come in for lunch because you can hear Mum banging pots about in the kitchen. And you don't start thinking about supper at half-four because you can already smell the roast cooking.

And none of it will be transfigured!

It's been a while since I've been home for Christmas, too. So I can't wait to see all the decorations: the garland and the candles, and Mum sticks cloves into apples--and oranges, too, if she can get any--and that makes everything smell great!

I hope they haven't brought in the pine boughs yet for over the doors. I remember going with Bill and Charlie when I was still pretty small and helping them pull the branches back home.

And Mum'll be humming carols all the time. And there'll be sweets for tea time.

I don't know how much snow there's been at home, but one year we got great gobs of it over the hols, and when Charlie came home from school, we made a giant snow fortress, and the twins made a cannon and shot snow balls at Percy and Ginny when they came out to see what we were up to!!!

And there'll be pie. And Mum's jam. And toast soldiers with our eggs.

So, yeah. I can't even wait!

So, yeah, hols were fun. My older brothers, Charlie and Bill, were here last weekend and that was wizard! They had loads of stories about dragons and cursed stuff and dueling, and Charlie brought me a dragon-hide wrist protector which is dead cool, and was really useful when we all went flying, cause I always have to have the wonky broom, so I'm always getting dumped off whenever I bank a turn, or sometimes it just coughs and drops like a stone and then starts up again (if I'm lucky). So I got pretty good at falling on my right arm, and then I found out that its as good as a beater bat for whopping Fred or George when they get cheeky. And we had amazing dinners--Mum had stuff bubbling on the stove all the time they were here, and pies and everything we all like. Oh, and Bill taught me a totally sorcerous charm for locking my door so the twins can't get in. Hope I remember it when we get home for summer.

But then when they went back, Charlie and Bill, it was back to work for the rest of us. I had to clean out all the cupboards upstairs--and I mean clean--I had to take everything out, charm away all the dust, then scourgify every shelf and the walls and the floors and even the ceiling, and I would have had to fold everything and put it back, but I was so hopeless with the folding spell that Mum made Ginny do it. (Good I never learned that, huh?)

And we trimmed the hedges and then we had to go to the Lovegoods and trim theirs, but Luna's Dad is really mad and hed made a bunch of his hedges into animal shapes that snapped their jaws at us or swung vicious tails to try to knock us off our brooms (and my broom didn't need any help with that!!) and we tried to petrify them, but that made the branches impossible to cut, so it was a huge load of work and when we got home Mum said we needed to finish getting the gnomes out the garden, cause a lot of them had moved back since we worked on it last week.

And all the days this week were pretty much like that. Today I had to clean out the canning room and the other cellars and I'm telling you, you don't even want to know what lives in our cellars!!! There was this one rat, Sally Anne, that was as big as my foot and that's not counting his tail and he was black as midnight. I wonder if Pansy's kneazle is any bigger!! And there were tons of totally evil spiders down there. You wouldn't believe how big their webs were, I mean some of them were floor to ceiling and then if you looked up in the rafters, you could see great wads of white web wrapped in sort of packages that were as big as rats, and I'm telling you, I couldn't get out of there fast enough!!

So I'm kind of glad we're going back to school tomorrow. It'll be good to get back to Neville's snoring and Seamus' foul socks and wondering if Trevors going to turn up on my pillow or in my shoes.