When the snowman brings the snow

What with the fun and expense of birthdays behind us for the year Ben decided we should celebrate Christmas!  It felt right seeing as the weather it's cold, rainy and dark over here.  And so it was decided that we would have our own little mid year christmas, decorate our room, try and get a christmas tree, buy each other a few gifts and have a little christmas dinner

then we mentioned it to our housemates and suddenly it became a big christmas eve party followed by a more select group for christmas dinner the next day

i suggested that to save money and decorate cheaply we should make snowflakes and paperchains - after spending every evening for two weeks cutting the damn things out I started thinking perhaps we could afford to buy a few things!

we found a website selling cheap decs and managed to get a tree, christmas crackers, tinsel, baubles and other assorted christmas necessities and set about decorating our huge high ceilinged house!  It took a lot of work but it was totally worth it and we transformed out hallway and kitchen into a winter wonderland!  Also being up on a ladder putting up christmas decs gave ben and leeanne the perfect opportunity to sweep up the cobwebs!

as well as decorating the house we also had to make our outfits and due to a moment of madness in a fabric shop and even though i've never sewed anything harder than a button i managed to volunteer to making a tutu for Leeanne, head piece for Heather that looked like the top of a bauble and reindeer arms for Ben as well as making my own Christmas Cracker outfit!

luckily i had friday (Christmas Eve) off work and it turns out that as long as you don't want things to look perfect sewing isn't that hard!  however even though we'd been preparing for weeks and had plenty of time somehow it got to 7.30pm on Friday night (which was when we'd told people to arrive) and we hadn't finished rearranging the furniture and none of us were in our costumes!

thankfully no one turned up on time and the party was a lot of fun and lots of people made an effort to dress up - the only stressful part was that we kept running out of punch and everyone knew i was making it so i kept getting sent back to the kitchen to make more daiquiris, then we ran out of fruit and all we had left was onions and lemons

i feared an ugly scene but heather managed to appease the crowd with cocktail wieners

and thanks so a moment of sensibleness at 3am we got lots of the clearing up done and didn't wake up to too much of a bomb site of christmas day

me and heather prepared a delicious christmas brunch of croissants, muffins, bacon, smoked salmon, avocado and poached eggs while leeanne baked christmas cookies then we watched It's a wonderful life before heading back to the Kitchen to prepare the christmas feast - a meal that had originally been planned for 3pm but ended up being eaten at about 7pm

In the end there were 9 of us - Ben, Me, our friend Dale,  Heather and her friends Hannah and Kim, Leeanne and her friend Michael and Max - who Leeanne has known for a week and we'd all met for the first time the night before when he'd arrived really early and I gave him the task of decorating the front door which he did very well and he was all Danish and "I've never seen a christmas cracker before" so it was decided he should stay for all of christmas

we had pork, chicken, roast pots, roast pumpkin, grilled courgettes and peppers, sweet potato mash, leeks in cheese sauce, sage and onion stuffing, cranberry sauce, apple sauce and gravy mmm mmmm mmmmm mmmmmmm

and for dessert instead of a flaming christmas pudding we had a sparkling creme caramel!

boxing day was a much more quiet affair and only me, ben and heather made the boxing day walk then we came home and ate cheese and all too soon christmas was over

however me and ben had decided that we wouldn't do presents but instead would treat ourselves to a weekend away - for what would have been New Year

we decided to head to one of the mountains in order to see some snow and feel properly wintery, we picked Lake Mountain mainly because it's the closest and we could easily get a bus from the city to the town of Marysville (at the bottom of the bottom of the mountain where all the accommodation is)

we found a place to stay online and crossed our fingers that it would be as nice as the pictures and then spent the whole week being impatient and over excited!  by the time it got to friday we were so excited about our little adventure and thankfully the journey there went smoothly as I was all too aware that there's only one bus a day to this place and no other way to get there!

we arrived at about 9pm and the guy from Blackwood Cottages where we were staying insisted on picking us up from the bus stop and driving us the 100m to the place!  it turned out to be better than we had expected, all warm and cosy with heaters everywhere and electric blankets

we got the spa started straight away and tucked into the free port and the cheese selection we had brought with us

on the saturday morning ben was restless as the radiators had been "clicking" and keeping him awake, then we had a dawn chorus of wild birds trying to kill each other which led ben to get up earlier than he does for work so he could be the first to feed them!

Part of our breakfast hamper had been bird seed and it was easy to see why as ben was only outside for 2 minutes when the cockatoos came sweeping in sitting on our balcony and roof, we fed them for ages - they even ate out of our hands then i headed in to make breakfast and ben decided to put some crackers out

unfortunately this attracted the horrible big blackbirds and magpies with their evil stares and vicious beaks and it all went a bit hitchcock so we had to close the door and stay inside til then gone

after a rather delicious breakfast ben went out again and this time the parrots came for food - so many of them it was unbelievable, our balcony wa sa sea of green and they were so brave eating out of our hands and even landing on our heads! i wasn't the biggest fan of this!

then we headed into the town to hire snow clothes and toboggans and have a coffee before heading up the mountain - the drive up wasn't too long but was very windy and funny to see that half way up there's no snow then you go round another corner and suddenly everything's covered in a light sprinkle of snow!

at the top the snow was about 15-20cm deep and lots was all fresh as it had been snowing the night before - and it snowed whilst we were up there!  the sledge runs were fairly tame as it was basically for kids but we found a way to go up into the trees and make the run longer and slightly more interesting - had to make sure the warden guy was looking the other way when we set off though otherwise he told us off for sledging on the walkway!

we only had 3 hours in the snow but it was enough as it was extremely cold - and we lost almost an hour trying to get a cup of coffee and a bag of chips from the slowest people in the world, not helped by the fact that they would take people's order and their name, separate the food from the drinks and then spend ages preparing them.  The drinks guy was the slowest so food man would do his part and people would take their food and go sit down then 10mins later drink guy would be calling them in the quietest voice in the world and they were off scrumming down their chips the entire operation would then stop while they tried to find the person the drinks were for!- when i got to the front i had lost patience with their system and decided to help out in getting people's attention so for about 15mins while i was waiting for ben's coffee they told me the name and i yelled it out at an audible level across the room "kenny" took me 4 yells before he came for his coffee's laughing away that he'd heard me all the way over the other side of the room and i couldn't help thinking that a man so stupid as to go that far away and fail to listen out for his name to be called just so he could sit down didn't deserve his coffee as much as those of us who were suffering the horror of standing our ground by the counter

in summary it was bleak

anyway we did some more sledging afterwards, almost took out some small children and then saved one from going over a precipice - unfortunately however we failed to save our sledge from this fate and then i had to scramble down and get it while ben looked on laughing and filming!!!

once we got back to Marysville we did a little shopping to stock up for our first BBQ which went extremely well and was very tasty, we then had another evening of lounging around in our super warm cabin and relaxing in our spa - which we filled with bubbles!

sunday we had a nice lazy morning and another yummy breakfast then headed to Bruno's Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden for a look around then wandered along the riverside - hoping to see a duck billed platypus in the wild but it was not to be - just lots of pretty birds

so overall we had a lovely christmas and new year - slightly tainted by a week of work in between but we didn't let that stop us having fun!

Australia snow was suprisingly good - not Oslo standards of course but better than some of the snow we've had while we've been sledging at the George IV or that year it was basically icy mud up at Royston Heath!

and it was nice to have the contrast of spending the christmas weekend with everyone then it being just the two of us for new year

unfortunately now we are flat broke so it's back to work and the gym and not going out if we can avoid it

roll on next christmas!