My family and other animals

It was Easter recently and along with Easter comes all of the tradition and ritual that you would expect from a displaced Greek family.  We have always celebrated Easter in a major way, and as children attended Church more often than the priests around this time of year.  I have stopped the church attendance part but everything else is present and accounted for.

So a traditional Easter will include the following:

Christmas lunch.

So it’s the same every year, we start to talk about Christmas and all of the things that need to be done in advance.  We were going to be 19 for Christmas lunch this year, and as a result, I had to rearrange the house. Furniture had to be taken apart and then put back together again.  Chairs had to be procured.  Crockery and cutlery had to be sourced, and some items of furniture had to be relocated.  Everything that had to be relocated ended up in my room, which made moving around in the dark an exciting and sometimes painful experience. 

Hello again…

It’s true, I admit it, towards the end of 2014 I fell off the writing wagon.  It’s not that I didn’t have anything to write about, it’s just that I stopped having the (or rather – making the) time to write.  I know you aren’t all out there waiting with bated breath, but I feel like I let myself down.  Still though that was last year.  This year will be different, I can feel it.

Too many chefs

 

 

A few weeks ago, I gathered some friends together at my place.  We had intended to make it a ‘games night’ – a throwback to our youth when we used to get together every week and play ping pong and board games in my parents’ basement  That weekend was a long weekend, so the Sunday evening get-together was a good opportunity to meet on what would ordinarily be a school night.

Christmas Day

Christmas day dawns and the good news is that Santa came.  Opening stocking presents on Christmas morning is one of the highlights of the year for me.  My sister and I snuggle up under the duvet and open tissue wrapped gifts amid ‘oohs, aahs’ and ‘thank you Santas’.  We rip open the gifts and this year I got my bed full of glitter from the tissue paper.  Santa came through with socks, underwear, fresh pyjamas for New Year’s Eve and this year unusually, tonnes of sweets. Clearly Santa feels I need to be sweeter.  If Christmas could just be this bit, I would easily declare it my perfect holiday and leave it at that.  After all, waking up in the morning and retiring back to bed with loved ones and opening presents is about as close to perfection as one can get.

‘Twas the night before Christmas

So, Christmas goes by and I am left with the same overwhelming feeling every year.  Was it worth it?

Was it worth the days of preparation, the hours of shopping, the hours spent in the kitchen molesting large birds, the rearranging of the house, all for a few hours? 

The calm before the storm

After two days of packing, and with Peter having told me that things were on track, and there wasn’t much more to do, (Take that, viewer lady!) I expected a quiet-ish weekend with not too much to do.   All I had planned was Sunday lunch with my sister and her family.  She had requested roast chicken, but I explained that all my pots and pans were already in boxes, so it would be picnic stuff.