This picture was taken last year on our annual trip to cut down our Christmas tree. We have low-key Christmases. We do our shopping, wrapping and shipping early (by early December) and forget about Christmas until a few days before…then we go up to our land and cut down a tree. Christmas Eve we drive around town to look at the lights and up to a lookout point in the mountains to look at the stars. Christmas morning we play carols and open our presents.
Our traditions have changed a bit with time, of course. When Kaitlin was little we used to play Christmas carols and decorate wrapping paper in late October/early November…that stopped when she got older and left home. We also used to play carols when we took our Christmas Eve drive. Now we play livelier and more secular tunes. Our favorite is Percy the Puny Poinsettia:
It’s completely silly and it tickles my funny bone. I find myself dancing around the house singing lines like
If they had just kept him wetta,
He’d be a houseplant today.
Who said Christmas was just for kids? 😉
What are some of your favorite holiday traditions, Christmas or otherwise?
well that was quite fun! the clip I mean…
it is now Boxing Day here and I don’t think I have anything Traditional to achieve on it!
Christmas Day…I will post some thing on my blog page later
.-= Cathy in NZ´s last blog ..December 24th, 2009 – Auckland, NZ =-.
Cathy,
I’m looking forward to reading it. 🙂
When we had the 4 kids here, we chopped down the biggest tree & loaded it with years of decorations, including all the ones the kids made. Lots presents, little presents, too many socks. Big turkey dinner.
When I was growing up, the turkey dinner included my father’s 2 brothers & their children. Plus some aunts.
We didn’t get a lot which didn’t matter because one uncle owned a dept. store & their house was jam packed with toys.
Their tree was spectacular! That was the highlight of the day.
Now we don’t have a tree, a turkey, presents, decorations, family. (Lots of outdoor lights but too much snow & too lazy… A zillion red chili pepper lights-New Mexico look- with which I didn’t bother to cover the railings.)
Was a lovely Christmas. *we send money to kids & buy what we want all year
bikehikebabe,
We had sent off a box of things for Kaitlin, Torben and the granddogs and grandcats, and Kaitlin and my sister phoned, which is a nice way of connecting. I always give Andy science fiction books for Christmas, and he sat and read the afternoon and evening…until 3:45 am, clearly the books were a success. I exercised while watching DVDs from Netflix and played some challenging Sudoku. It was a great day but very nontraditional. Can you guess we’re not the most extroverted people in the world? 🙂
Cathy,
The neat thing where you are is that things are open. Here most businesses close up, some for the whole weekend. That makes it hard for people without families. Some people can get very depressed during the holidays. Does that happen in NZ too? I imagine it’s not so bad when the sun is out and it’s not so dark and dreary.
Yes, Cathy in NZ. In our small town if the library & grocery store are closed, where do you go for recreation?
Someone once asked me, “If you don’t play bridge, what do you do?
“We play tennis, bicycle (road bike or mountain bike), hike, backpack, dance, kayak or raft, ice-skate, snowshoe, ski downhill or cross country eat & sleep.”
the retail shops are only closed Xmas Day…the next day the Boxing Day (3/4days) sales start.
however, places like the library, the bank, the Post office, other similar sort of places are closed.
some of the smaller retail establishments i.e. bakeries, small other stores (not in Malls) close for maybe up to 3wks.
of course, we all know 🙂 that the Internet doesn’t ever close! or for that matter whatever neat software we have on our computers and with the event of DVD attachments and so on there is plenty of entertainment
My TV on the other hand is rehashing movies I saw last year, the year before and so on…I don’t how many times they have showed Oliver Twist (please Sir, I am still hungry. has been the trailer for days!)
.-= Cathy in NZ´s last blog ..Yah, it’s Boxing Day! Box on People 🙂 =-.
Cathy in NZ, thanks for taking me on the trip on Christmas.
(I read about it on her blog.)
no problems – sorry about the lack of snow 🙂
.-= Cathy in NZ´s last blog ..Yah, it’s Boxing Day! Box on People 🙂 =-.
bikehikebabe,
Yes, our little community does select for people who like the outdoors. I know a lot of families who either left the area or moved to Santa Fe and commuted to work.
Cathy,
Yes, I do love those DVDs and my exercise equipment! I would also read a lot if my eyes would let me. Fortunately Sudoku doesn’t seem to bother them and it’s good mental exercise (and addictive). And, as you point out, there’s the universe of the internet. 🙂
I think it’s great that you have good public transportation. It’s better here than it used to be, which was zilch.
There are many holiday traditions in India and Christmas and New Year celebrations are significant ones too. All communities celebrate these two occasions just as they do the others like Diwali, Id etc. I personally stopped celebrating any festival after Ranjan decided that he will not have any thing to do with fire works and crackers that are now widely used during all festivals, not just Diwali. The reason that he took this decision was that when this happened, the dogs everywhere suffered from shock on a non stop basis for the duration of the festivals, running into days. It is not a pretty sight to see or care for dogs when crackers and fireworks go off all around the neighborhood.
.-= Rummuser´s last blog ..World Tour On Bicycle By Siddhartha Priya. =-.
Rummuser,
Bless Ranjan! We don’t have problems with fire crackers here, but we do have thunderstorms that make some dogs frantic. I can well imagine that your fireworks would be much worse.
  MIRTH & BLASPHEMY (a limerick)
Picture out front of Auckland kirk,
Seen by some as Devil’s work
(Some who’d never dream
In this way to blaspheme),
Has at any rate
Prompted some debateÂ
About the Savior’s birth
And, in some, a little mirth.
The Washington Post, 29 December 2009:
LETTER FROM NEW ZEALAND
Church billboard knocks Santa ‘off center stage’.
Effort to inspire talk about faith sparks laughs — and ire.
“… a billboard outside St. Matthew-in-the-City, a towering neo-gothic Anglican church on a bustling street in downtown Auckland.”
“The poster features Mary and Joseph in bed and apparently naked under the sheets. Joseph looks dejected, while Mary gazes toward the heavens.”
“The caption reads: ‘Poor Joseph, God was a hard act to follow.'”
“The church insists that the billboard is an attempt to spark a discussion about faith in an increasingly secular nation. Some say it has at least prompted a laugh or two.”
“‘I think it’s brilliant,’ Lesley Underwood, 60, a customer service representative said in an interview… She called it ‘humorous’ and ‘very much a conversation piece in the city.'”
“Many others disagree, saying it is jarring — if not deeply offensive.”
“‘To make Joseph look like some kind of wimp or inadequate is so derisive and disrespectful, it’s beyond belief,’ said Lyndsay Freer, a spokeswoman for the Auckland Catholic Diocese. ‘To believers, it’s blasphemous.'”
bikehikebabe,
I’m amazed that a church would do this…when I showed it to Andy he read it but missed the point that it was the church’s attempt to start a dialogue. Apparently it did just that…as the article says, it’s “very much a conversation piece in the city.”
Here’s a link to a CBS news article about it.