Christmas Day

Twitter made Christmas interesting this year – loads of people spending time with family but still all on Twitter airing their lack of enjoyment of family tensions to their online friends and followers. And from all over the world so we all had a kind of international Christmas! Glad to say no tensions in our day – a few repeated conversations and kids being chided – but that’s pretty normal stuff. It was also truly special to spend some time in our own home on Christmas Day with friends and their family from overseas that we’d never met.

We started out at the beach house with a mountain of gifts for the kids

Happy niece #1 – got to see the mysterious beados that’d we’d searched long and hard for – they were at hit and the gift that Amy chose to play with straight away!

Home at lunchtime to start preparing for guests, with a quick sandwich lunch under the tree & some gifts from Mother & Father as we didn’t get to see them this Christmas

Enjoyed receiving photos from Father, documenting their very sunny Bay of Plenty Christmas Day – here he is in their vegetable garden (something they now have since retiring!) picking peas for Christmas dinner

Here’s Ryan who we just met that day (Sara’s brother) being put to work in the kitchen already

Lovely happy Christmas dinner with the urban family and actually we didn’t provide much of the food in the end – our guests came laden and it was wonderful! I can’t stop staring at this photo – to me it’s a perfect picture and we really did spend the afternoon and evening eating and smiling (our fridge is bulging with left-overs)

Happy niece #2 – then right on cue at bedtime I received a picture text from my sister of Georgia in her Christmas pjs – she loves them, she (& everyone) was really impressed that I’d sewn them and they fit!

And thanks to my Secret Santa for excellent gifts – Patricia Cornwell novel, Williams & Sonoma voucher (to spend in America yipeeeee!) & Obama paper dolls 🙂

Also got this completely unexpected and fabulous luggage tag for our travels from Lucy (probably a more polite thing than I’d say so useful to have it written on a tag!)

Christmas 2009 was great.