Christmas and New Year's Day

Christmas and New Year

So I just realised I never posted my Christmas and New Year story. As always it was incredibly warm here in South Africa. Luckily we are sort of used to it, but don’t judge me when I say I love winter time. Yesterday alone we had a high of 36 degrees Celsius.

So for the Christmas weekend we hooked up our caravan, and left Bloemfontein with two cars (my dad and I still had to work the Saturday). We went to a place a little out of Bloem about 25 km and pitched our tents and setup everything for a long 5 day weekend. We went with my dad’s cousin, so we were a lot of people. On Saturday morning (Christmas Eve) I went to work and after work bought some fresh bread and made sure everything was ready for that evening. We were going to have a fondue that night, which is a new thing for us since we usually just make finger snacks for Christmas Eve. So after loading everything in the car equipped with Christmas lights and these cool things I found, They look like candy canes and when you leave them in the sun during the day, at night they light up, no electricity or batteries needed. They were awesome.

So we started prepping for our fondue by cutting up meats, mushrooms, pieces of bread, and everything that works nicely with fondue, that was at about 5 in the afternoon, the funny part was when we wanted to light the burners of the fondue pots they started burning around the burners instead of inside (we haven’t used them in a while) so in my car I get and went home to get the electric pans and we did our fondue that way. It was wonderful; we all had a great time and ate too much.

We had a chocolate fountain running for dessert, memo to all people out there, when entertaining don’t test out a gadget for the first time. We were completely out of our depth with that thing, we didn’t have the right equipment to melt the chocolate, we threw in too much oil in the chocolate and it all came out blobby, but still it was hilarious and we enjoyed ourselves.

We then just sat around telling stories about Christmas’s past, and remember the people who aren’t there with us either because they were in other parts of the world or those who have left us to go to a better place. We talked a laughed and cried a little. We also listened to one of the local radio stations that lets people phone in wishing their relatives a happy Christmas. We laughed at all the drunken comments on the radio.

When it was past midnight we opened our presents, and went to bed. You might realise I don’t elaborate about the presents, it’s just that my parents taught us it’s not about the presents, it is about Jesus coming to earth to save us. That is what is the most important of Christmas, so we never got the big presents. We spend time with family and just realising how lucky we are to be able to practice our faith openly.

On Christmas day we all packed the Christmas lunch and made our way to Edinburg were my grandmother and uncle live. It’s about 100km from where we camped. We barely survived the potholed road, there were more potholes than tar but we had a great day with my gran and uncle. I must thank them for this was the best Christmas we had with them. You guys were wonderful, you opened your house to people who weren’t invited and changed your whole plan for Christmas lunch. I love you guys.

We went back to camp and just spend the rest of the day enjoying each other’s company and just being merry.

We had a storm on Boxing Day; we all huddled together under our big tent, and got soaked to the bone. Each time we had to run to the bathroom. We only went home on the Tuesday, thank you to all the people who got us an extra public holiday; we had to start working again on Wednesday.

We had a great New Year’s weekend as well. On the Saturday after work, we started making salads and preparing our finger snacks for that night. As you can see the finger snack thing is a Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve tradition. We also have a tradition of watching Dinner for One on New Year’s Eve. So we watched that while enjoying our snacks and then we watched a movie. We all stayed up until midnight, we just had a cowering Boerbul since people were shooting fireworks and crackers from about 19:00 that evening. The poor dog nearly went crazy. I think it’s really inconsiderate of some people.

We spent our New Year’s Day at home in the swimming pool and had a lovely turkey for lunch.  

So there is our Christmas and New Year’s I hope you enjoyed. Pictures will follow in the next blog