The Holidays

"The Holidays" is a term used in Oz not just for Christmas and New Years, but all of Summer Break as well. You can imagine cramming in all the "end of year" projects/parties/teacher gifts into an already full early-December! But despite the hectic lead up to Christmas, they pull it off year in and year out. Then everybody takes off on holiday. And I mean everybody. Offices closed, phones offline, they are OUT. December and January are a ghost town round here as friends are off galavanting around Europe or cruising the islands or touring Asia for 4-6 weeks at a time. That's doing "vacation" right. And you can't blame them when most every destination is "overseas" and requires an expensive airline ticket. Leaving for a month or two at a time is the only cost-efficient way to go.

For purposes of this post however, I'll just try to catch up with how the end of 2013 "holidays" looked for our fam.

The lead up to Christmas was lovely. Lots of baking, puzzles, a bit of caroling, plenty of Santas and reading around the tree with eggnog each night.

lots of notes between Fizbo and Annie - heart melters

Will trying a dizzying approach to stringing up the lights

Summer needed little supervision (or clothing) in December with all the Christmas decor around.

this one gave out free gelato coupons!

She was pretty enamored with Santa too. She kept wrapping up gifts for him under the tree.

The Embassy Christmas party was funny. Des wouldn't get near Santa, but walked around with a soda in one hand and three cookies in the other as if he owned the place.

We also enjoyed Carols By Candlelight for the first time. Beautiful venue out in the park. Everyone brings picnics, candles, and enjoys the show, singing along with the traditional carols while hundreds of bats fly overhead at dusk. Christmas at its finest!

 A couple more special events in Canberra: home to the Guinness World Record for the Most Lights on a house (over half a million.) We braved the 90 minute line to walk through the driveway and there was pretty much not a surface unlit. What a feat of time and ENERGY.

And then there's this whole 12 Days of Christmas Celebration downtown. Free camel rides, blow up castles, water games, climbing walls, bumper boats, bungee tramps. It was a a kid's dream and barely any lines!

Will was a gentle Joseph again for the Ward Nativity and Summer took her shepherding very seriously, stroking the one "sheep"s head constantly. We sure will miss these friends!

We enjoyed a super long stretch of Dad being home (he gets Australian and US holidays which means about a week and a half at the end of the year) by just vegging out together. And while the house was a pigsty, we sure reveled in the R&R.

 Christmas Eve stayed light til 9:30 so it gave us plennnnnty of time to pack in everything. Movies, bubbly, Summer finally getting to play Baby Jesus in the world's laziest Nativity, Christmas reading, Santa/reindeer food, etc. etc.

 

 Christmas Morning:

from this.... to this...

Can you beat Christmas Day spent in the pool? I don't know... Pool toys. Best $15 I ever spent, and many thanks to our kind neighbors Christmasing in Europe who gave us free reign. :)