A Day out at Standen House | A Beale Family Christmas

Jupiter recently got a National Trust membership as this year (and into next) seems to be one where primarily only outdoor events are what we are going to be getting along too. This membership covers a lot of parks, historical houses, and areas within Britain that we are going to aim to explore. So, when checking out the Christmas section of the National Trust website, we stumbled upon Standen House, where the Beale Family once lived – and though we didn’t really know who that was, we were excited to take a look around. Standen House ended up being one of our favorite National Trust sites in Essex.

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A Day Out at Weald Country Park

Jupiter really loves deer. She grew up in a small town that had a lot of deer, deer hunting, and often just wild deer wandering about. As we have been going on more creative date nights, due to most things being shut, I surprised her with a trip to Weald Country Park – which ended up being so popular, that we went back with the kids. This time of year is when all of the deer are out, making it a perfect wintertime activity. Weald Country Park is free to enter – although if you park nearby you’ll need to pay for the car park – and contains a few different park areas, trails, a pond, deer and a cafe.

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Picking out our Christmas Tree at Christmas Wrapped Up | Day Out

As a part of creating new traditions with our family, we decided to go to the same Christmas Tree farm as last year: Christmas Wrapped Up. We ended up spending the afternoon picking out a tree. There is something so special about being able to walk around a plot of trees, taking a look at each one before picking out the one you want – as I said before, last year was the first time that the children got to do it, so this year it was still incredibly new to them. As you might expect, trees are all quite different, although we went with a very specific tree in mind, something that was big and would fill up our living room. After clearing some space in our home and getting all of our decorations together, we set off.

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A Day Out at Christmas Wonderland at Lakeside

When we heard that Winter Wonderland in London was cancelled this year, we were pretty sad. Dann and I always make a journey to the lovely Winter Wonderland, enjoying all of the foods, rides, and more. Despite it being cancelled, Christmas Wonderland is taking place at Lakeside, and although it isn’t as big, it does have ice skating! I love ice skating so much, it’s something I’ve always done. As a young kid, when ponds would freeze over, everyone would get their skates and ice skate along them, playing games of hockey or just hanging out. It’s a lovely time, so when Dann surprised me with the tickets to go ice skating, I was pretty pumped.

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A Day Out at Marsh Farm Halloween Festival

We returned to Marsh Farm, where we had previously gone to pick pumpkins, for their annual Halloween Festival – an impressive event which has a lot more going on than any of us expected.

Even though the days seem to be getting shorter, and the temperature keeps dropping, it’s more important than ever to make sure that you get out of the house when you can. We’d already travelled to pick pumpkins at Marsh Farm’s impressive Pumpkin Village earlier in the month, and while there we noticed that there was actually much more to the place than a village shop and extremely well laid-out and decorated pumpkin patch. We spotted an entryway reminiscent of theme park booths, and what looked like a carousel. We had to go back and see the whole thing – so we set a day aside and headed there on a quiet Sunday.

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