Christmas day post

Merry christmas everyone!

Today I cooked my first ever Christmas dinner! We got our sea freight delivered yesterday which was nice because it meant we could invite people over and not sit on a cardboard box dining table, and we had everything else needed to do a Christmas dinner.

So yesterday we spent the entire day unpacking our 110 sea freight boxes so that the place would look reasonable. There was a few stressful moments when we couldn’t see a lounge room set up that didn’t involve couches being in the way, the TV being too far away from the only cable tv outlet, or worrying about a configuration that meant expensive speakers would not be able to be used. Legs for the coffee tables had also gone missing as had bolts to put them on, which was a bit frustrating, but things were eventually found (in boxes that had nothing to do with the dining room!). After going out to the shops to get a few things and clear my head, I got home and almost immediately saw a lounge room configuration that would work and things were looking a lot more under control.

So Christmas morning this morning felt very non-christmasy as it was only us and we had too much to do to really think about Christmas too much!

We’d invited Michael, and another recent Aussie Google hiree also named Andrew and his wife Margaret to join us for Christmas lunch, so I started preparing about 11am (it was going to be a late lunch). I thought this whole lunch thing sounded easy. Put together the ready to go stuffing, stuff the turkey, cut some vegies, cook it all, and voila Christmas lunch! There seemed to be a lot more involved. Christmas lunch/dinner was ready at about 3:30pm I think, and I was in the kitchen most of that 4 ½ hours! It wasn’t too bad though. I enjoyed cooking for the first “dinner party” in our new place, and I tried doing Yorkshire puddings for the first time using my nan’s recipe.

So the others brought stuff and we had a combined traditional American/Australian/English Christmas dinner with turkey, cold ham, roasted and steamed vegies, Yorkshire puddings and gravy, and for dessert we had plum pudding (bought especially from the Aussie shop in San Jose) with custard (surprisingly hard to find, and what we got was some slightly odd Jello custard stuff....), and pumpkin pie, which we were a little worried about, but turned out to be quite nice. The pumpkin pie was interesting to cook. It was a frozen Sara Lee type pie, which you normally just throw in the oven for a bit then eat. This one was “Homemade” and uncooked as opposed to cook and reheat, so took 1 ½ hours to cook, then was suppose to cool in the fridge for 2 hours!!! Instead we threw it in the freezer for 10 minutes and ate it semi-cooled.....

I really enjoyed it – it was nice to have a quiet Christmas after having so much happening over the last couple of months. It was also nice to have cooked most of it myself! I just told my nan about the Yorkshire puddings and she’s very proud :)

We’ve also got pretty good weather at the moment. I mean it’s been raining a bit, and the next few days say rain, but it’s certainly not all that cold considering it’s the middle of winter! We really haven’t put the heater on at all. Before our doona arrived, I was putting it on in the bedroom for 10 minutes before bedtime and closing the door just to heat the room up, but even now I’m waking up too hot with the doona, and I don’t think we’ll even bother with it. On the warm days I can walk around in jeans and t-shirt and be comfortable, and I’m someone who really feels the cold.

Our place is also looking reasonably unpacked and livable, so that’s also good! We’re happy with our townhouse and the area, and are already feeling very settled which is nice.

Andrew’s got the next 2 days off, so we’ll have to make sure we take a break from unpacking to go and see some of the local sights!

I hope everyone else had a good Christmas and isn’t too stuffed with food! :)