Christmas 2011

What can we say? That was a completely and utterly fabulous Christmas!

The sun shone for days on end and the temperature climbed up for us (although at 24 degrees centigrade it was still 20 degrees less than last year!). But enough to spend most of the last few days outdoors having the kind of Kiwi Christmas we’ve really missed while we’ve been away over the last few years.

First off, Jake was desperate to re-instate his tradition of surfing at Christmas, so on Xmas Eve we packed the board in the car and drove over to Lyall Bay where, in true tradition, the water was almost flat as a pancake and unsurfable. This follows a pattern – the same thing always happens every year, but at least this year he didn’t make us wake up at 6am to do it. Instead, we spent half a day pottering about in the waves and lazing in the sun – bliss! It was also probably a good thing, since Jake managed to fall under a train a couple of days ago (but that’s another story altogether!) and I’m not sure that surfing would have been a good idea in his current condition.

We followed this up with a potter around Breaker Bay, one of our favourite beaches in Wellington, where we spent a lot of time over the winter – it’s such an absolutely stunning place. Unfortunately this time we were left rather red faced when we discovered that unbeknown to us, it is actually a nudist beach. Over the last 6 months the winter weather has been somewhat cooler, thus preventing much nudism from taking place, so we had never realised before. But this time the crowds were out – which was a little difficult to explain to the kids and a little uncomfortable for us! 

To round off the day we followed one of my family traditions and celebrated Wigilia (a Polish Christmas celebration) with fish and chips on the beach at Seatoun. Wigilia demands that no red meat is eaten, and as a child I grew up on fish every Christmas Eve. This seemed like a pretty good way of adapting the tradition!

For Christmas Day, Jake managed to build our new barbeque (despite train injuries) and our Christmas lunch was a fantastic traditional kiwi concoction of steak, sausages, kebabs and pavlova followed by a lazy afternoon with some new friends - lots of sunshine, more pavlova, beer, wine and water play (depending on your age).

Yesterday we hung out on Raumati Beach where a couple of kids had just been out fishing and brought back a baby tiger shark – yikes! Everyone had a little stroke of its fins, but we got out of the water pretty fast after that!

The whole Christmas period followed this same pattern – lots of beaches were visited, shells and stones collected, crabs and starfish were poked, and in between we hung out in the garden drinking wine, playing music, opening presents, playing with presents, etc etc. And it’s not all over yet so I better get back to it....bye for now!