Thoughts of Christmas and Holidays

Christmas 2014 seemed to roll around extraordinarily fast. Mark and I decided that it would be nice for him spend Christmas with his family as he has not spent a Christmas with them for 10 years.

Faced with a quiet Christmas I felt a bit flat. I had the best plans to put a tree up early to get into the festive spirit and as the days went by I procrastinated about putting it up and felt a bit down.

Things changed the week before Christmas when I received a text from my cousin (pretty much my sister) asking seriously what were “my plans for Christmas” as they were all keen to come up. So we went from a relatively quiet, low-key Christmas of 3 to a full-on-family-fun Christmas of 7.

Suffice to say I put the tree up the day that they arrived as her eldest daughter was getting quite stressed that I had not put our tree up. It is simply amazing how fast you can put a tree up when the pressure is on.

Christmas was fantastic. It was pretty low-key and really relaxing and lovely. There is something to be said for having Christmas with teenagers as they still really get into the whole festive side of things.

The day that they left was the day that my best friend from Wellington arrived and we had an absolute blast. We drove all over Auckland, relaxed a bit, ate yummy Mexican food and did a teeny bit of shopping. 

Two of my friends had their babies in December which was amazing and exciting. 

For the rest of our holidays Mark and I just chilled out and did a few things around the house. Could we have done more? Probably. Was the weather really hot and humid…absolutely. Did we finally have our first summer BBQ? YEP! Mark made us some rustic pallet furniture.

Amazingly, I was really laid-back about returning to work on the 12^th and I eased back into the work-year without much trauma.

Now it is February…and we are already planning for things in April.