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. :)

Noel

Christmas is finally packed away again (why does it take forever?) And now we're in the full swing of summer break, so blog posts may be light (somehow the "longer days" don't translate into "more time.") But I had to post the highlights of our very sweet Christmas. We have a shot of every one of our babies' first Christmas in this stocking. Can't wait to put them all together and compare someday.

 Christmas Eve day was so relaxing. We lounged about, did festive pancakes and Darren almost proved me wrong by finishing up our "too-easy Christmas puzzle" in an hour.

Annie was so sad to see Fizbo go, but he left nice goodbye notes

My mum sent us some great "snow" in various forms. The powdery stuff is awesome - kinda like nappy/diaper filling - it absorbs and expands instantly to an incredible degree.

And the edible stuff was even more awesome (thanks Mindi, for the snowman marshmallows too!)

 We spent the afternoon at a neighbor's pool party, which was a real switch on the ol' Christmas Eve. Then headed out to find some Christmas lights. It was much harder than you might imagine, but this one house made up for all the slackers (us included.) They had lights cascading down their whole house, it was awesome. Then we settled in at home for our traditional egg nog, music, nativity reading by the tree.

 My highlight: Darren joined me this year by assisting in all the wrapping up, laying out, stuffing, assembling and arranging. Hooray!! So much more fun with two! And earlier to bed! And despite Santa's sour milk fiasco I hope it's a new tradition!

 Christmas morning enthusiasm - The Best. They even slept in until almost 8am. Poor Will is in the background there trying to choke down some toast after being on death's door with rotavirus for the previous 7 days. Honestly, he didn't eat for almost 5 days and only stopped vomiting after I put him on some Zofran I had left over from my pregnancies. It was truly awful and he missed the last week of school parties, but at least strengthened up by Christmas.

Christmas Day was spent with our good friends, the Sorensons, and would you believe it, not a single picture! I spent 4 hours frantically pulling off the most speedy yet successful Thanksgiving fixings (homemade rolls, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, jello, veggies/dip, custard pie, and berry pie) because we'd both missed celebrating it this year and I didn't even document the end result.

Jeez, it's like we were tired or something. It was a beautiful and tasty meal and a delightful way to spend the day. We all marveled at how great it was that D felt so comfortable in their home that he fell asleep for 3 hours on their loveseat, too. Hahahaha.

Must be where this girl gets it from - D snapped her in for a "pre-bed snack" and came back 5 minutes later to this scene.

New Year's Eve was fun for the big kids. We stayed up playing Settlers of Katan and any time one of them would get sleepy they'd run out to their "Refresher Station" and dunk their heads. Did sparklers after the countdown and they slept in a tent in Will's room that night. Bye, bye 2012! Hello, 2013!!

 New Year's Day we were invited to a lovely brunch by some new friends in the ward (who are good friends with my cousin, if that isn't a small world.) While Will was enjoying intense Nerf gun fights, and the girls were hanging onto the cute teen girls, Summer just climbed up in between this couch full of handsome young men and handed them a book. Then she proceeded to commandeer the bowls of M&Ms laying about and distributed them among the guests, one by one. She is so loved, that little gal. As we sang along to the many guitars and ukes being strummed, we looked around at our kids all so happily engaged with their friends, and Des being snuggled by our big, sweet professional footballer, we felt so grateful to be among such good people who have embraced our family like their own. Such beautiful, wonderful people we have grown to love here!