Holiday Season

This was the first holiday season that I have spent away from home.  It was pretty much as different as it could be!  It is summertime here, which firstly means that it is warm here, not cold as it is back home.  It also means that the days are very long, not leaving many dark hours to turn on Christmas lights.  I didn’t see any real Christmas decorations anywhere in town or in people’s houses.  Because it is in the middle of the summer, there are many other things to think about, and the holiday season gets somewhat lost.  Back in the northern hemisphere, any holiday time we have at this time of the year is pretty much completely focused on Christmas (or Kwanzaa, etc) and New Year’s.  Here, people are thinking about summer jobs, and summer holidays, and summer school, etc.  Christmas just doesn’t seem to be a big deal in most places here.  Also, in the United States, we have Thanksgiving about a month beforehand, and that preps us for the holiday season.  I found myself missing the massive amounts of outdoor Christmas lights put up by overeager residents, the electric candles in the window of my house, and the candlelight service at my church.  Basically, all of the things you do in wintertime when it is dark.

After all of that, I did have a very enjoyable Christmas Day.  Even though it’s not dark enough for Christmas lights, I really have never been a fan of cold weather, so I am enjoying having another summer.  I also got to have a family Christmas, even if it wasn’t my family.  Kay Phillips, the president of the Harbour City Rotary Club, had invited me over to her flat for Christmas Day.  She was hosting her family this year, so it was a big get together.  The guest list included her father, her two children, her daughter’s partner, her sister and brother-in-law, and a friend.  And me!  I got over there fairly early in the morning, around 10.30, and didn’t leave till after 5.  I got to spend the whole day experiencing a real Kiwi Christmas.  I got to pop a Christmas cracker, and then all of us attempted to play music with our plastic whistles that came inside.  We had a huge feast, eating ham, lamb, turkey, stuffing, and more vegetables than I can remember.  Since it was their “real” Christmas, there were also a lot of presents to pass out.  I had a Santa hat with me, so I got to pass out all of the presents.  It was a really nice day, hanging out with her family, having a real Christmas.  It was also incredibly windy, as if Wellington had to remind me that I was actually still in Wellington.  I had a really good time that day, and it was amazing for Kay to invite me in to her family like that.  

After I left Kay’s, I went home to hang out with Nina for the rest of the day.  It was just the two of us for Christmas, since Claudia and Meredith are still travelling, and we did what we do best – watch movies!  There were a lot on that evening, but we spent most of it watching a commercial-free Shawshank Redemption.  So good!  Not really a Christmas movie, but good all the same.  Nina and I go see a lot of movies together.  We saw King Kong a little while ago, and we have already seen Zorro and The Family Stone this week with plans to also see Narnia and Broken Flowers.  Man, I love movies!

Skipping ahead now to New Year’s, it was like no New Year’s I have ever had before.  New Zealand is in the first time zone to get the New Year, which means that when we celebrate it, no one else has.  I didn’t get to watch the celebrations in Sydney, Singapore, Beijing, London, Paris, New York City, etc.  There weren’t any countdown programs like Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve, although several programs were interrupted with a countdown 10 seconds before midnight.  I had just gotten back from travelling for six days (more on that in the next post), so I was exhausted anyway.  Nina and I split a bottle of pinot gris over the course of the evening and sat up until midnight just to say that we had.  We hung out with some of the guys from the flats around us for a couple of hours earlier in the evening, and also had gotten our last meals at Satay Kingdom in 2005.  I baked chocolate chip cookies as well.  It was a very chill evening, very relaxing.  Not too much partying on our account (although I did hear the guys that we had been hanging out with earlier come back around 7AM).  It was a good night, all in all.  I saved the big partying for next New Year’s when I am A) 21 and B) back in New York’s time zone.

By the way, this is the year that I turn 21.  Feel old yet, parentals?  (