Tales of an Amorphic Destiny

Christmas!

December 25th, 2006 at 03:30pm James

Christmas time in London! The 2006 festive season brought us the usual mix of gargantuan quantities of food, a copious supply of drink and plenty of fun, laughs and laziness.

After Christmas parties and the December work wind-down, Bryce and ourselves celebrated Christmas Eve with a cheese and wine evening. To the cheese, salami and countless bottles of European wine we’d picked up on our trip to Belgium we added a number of British cheeses and other tasty snacks, resulting in a handsome spread. Put on some good tunes and settled in for the evening.

We even managed to do some preparation for Christmas lunch, stuffing the turkey and cooking the ham to save us spending all of the following day in the kitchen. This also ensures that lunch is served roughly on time, rather than at 9 o’clock in the evening (it’s happened before!).

Much later we decided it’d be a good idea to celebrate the very early hours of Christmas morning by setting off a box of fireworks that Bryce had thoughtfully purchased. Imagine our neighbour’s joy with us out the back doing this!

There’s a couple more photos of Christmas Eve here. Fortunately we were sensible enough to call it a night before things got too out of hand, so we were reasonably fresh in the morning.

Christmas morning started off Aussie-style with a breakfast BBQ. We cut up a up a huge hunk of ham and threw it on with the obligatory sausages. Sarah also kept up a family tradition by making some awesome banana muffins that we ate with some good strong coffee while waiting for everything else to cook.

After (and during!) breakfast everyone took turns on the house phone calling home to wish our beloved families a Merry Christmas. As an ex-pat you do always feel a little homesick on Christmas day so it’s great to say hi to everyone and hear about how their Christmas day was back home. It was a little depressing of course to hear stories of cold beer and swimming pools in the sunshine while we’re staying in with the central heating on or rugging up to go outside! It’ll warm up over here soon enough though and then the tables will be turned!

My ex-workmate Barnaby came round to join us and soon enough the bubbly and beers were flowing. Sorting out food, sauces etc in advance turned out being a master stroke and gave us much more time to relax and open presents to the mellow sounds of the Rat Pack’s Christmas Album. Even with our preparation there was still plenty to be done in the kitchen of course. But it was all fun and soon the gargantuan turkey was out and resting while the pork and trimmings were finished off.

It was time to eat, and we had a *lot* of food to get through. After starting lightly with a prawn and avocado cocktail we moved on to the main course – on the menu (from left to right – sort of) was potato bake, homemade gravy, apple and cranberry sauces, sweet potato, pumpkin, turkey (light and dark meat), cranberry and apple stuffing, potatoes, brussel sprouts, honey mustard glazed ham, roast pork, yorkshire puddings and cheesy stuffed mushrooms.

Needless to say, it was awesome and we all ate far too much. We still found the energy to pose for some photos though:

I was lucky enough to get some awesome presents. Bryce gave me Heston Blumenthal’s new book, which I’m really looking forward to reading after our visit to The Fat Duck in November. From Kris I received a retro mini-slinky and a Simpsons daily trivia calender, which now has pride of place on my desk at work. I’d given Sarah some body shop goodies and a game for her Nintendo DS earlier in the day, but the main attraction was a Lord of the Rings themed jewelery box which I only let her open after lunch. She usually has a good idea of what I’m getting her but this time she had no clue so it was a quite a surprise.

In return Sarah gave me a very cool spirit dispenser in the shape of a petrol pump. So far it’s only been filled with cheap red wine but I’ve got a bottle of scotch ready to empty in to it for the next house drinking session. I also received Dylan Moran’s new "Like, Totally… Live" DVD and having recently bought a projector for the lounge room as a Christmas present to myself, we had the perfect combination for some Christmas day laughs.

So with the sun going down we fired up the projector and settled in for a boozy night of comedy, complimented by cake and chocolate courtesy of Barnaby. After Dylan Moran we watched Kevin Bloody Wilson, causing the Aussies among us to get all patriotic which was bonza. I am now doing my best to adopt Kev’s DILLIGAF phrase at every possible opportunity. We drank well in to the wee hours of boxing day, before a few of us started nodding off on the lounge.

So that was it, another great Christmas with great friends, great food and great times!

Entry Filed under: Life in England