Merry Christmas!!

What the heck is the picture above, you ask? Well I actually don't know what the hand signs are, but the japanese inbetween the two figures says, "kurisumasu no hi". In english, this translates to "Christmas Day". I imagine that the hand gestures mean the same thing.

It's amazing for it to be Christmas for me. Last Christmas I was in the Lakes District in the north-west of England, in a place called Windermere. I met my friend Mary, who was living in London at the time, and was an old housemate of mine from when I was living down there, in Windermere, and we just spent a few days hanging out there. We had the most amazing Christmas lunch at this hotel/b&b place, drinking mulled wine, having the most amazing plates of roasts with red wine sauce, starters of smoked salmon, and desserts of I don't remember what.

And as fantastic as it was, I really missed being home last Christmas - it was my first Christmas away from home, and without my mum's most amazing Christmas lunch.

And now I would just love to be in the UK again, drinking mulled wine (I got half decent at making mulled wine as well), and being all cold, but snuggly.

I've been pretty "festive" this Christmas season. I made a point of ensuring that my workplace was decorated in Christmas cheer.

There isn't a huge amount of Christmas decorations, but we did have to start from scratch - as in myself and another workmate from my cubicle had to do a Big W, Crazy Clarks, and Target run one lunchbreak to get virtually everything we had up. One of the exceptions being the big red bow which I got the subsequent weekend from Big W at Garden City, and the other being the apron with the BBQ tools hanging from the ceiling behind the big red bow. The apron was obtained by making a concerted effort of collecting vouchers from the shops below our work: if we spent $8 in a single transaction from selected stores we would obtain 1 voucher; if we collected 7 vouchers, we could get an apron. To celebrate our effort, we hung it from the ceiling, and to celebrate our Ashes victory, we stuck two Australian flags in the pockets of the apron. I really should have taken a better photo of it because you can't really see it behind the bow.

Anyway, on our last day at work, some bright spark from work decided that we should dress in fancy dress. That was adopted with a surprising amount of vigour by a number of my workmates.
That ain't a woman in the white dress.... the less said about this the better...

So anyway I have to help make with home Christmas festivities, so must dash.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!