Christmas Weekend #1

Well, Christmas started this weekend.
Friday was the work Xmas Party. A bit glamourous really, 17th floor of a swish new building in the middle of the city, fancy ballroom, with a pretty amazing terrace with great views. A few hundred of the people from work, some rather more successful than others at trying to look suave and sophisticated, most of them just there to have a good time. Despite my best announced intentions that it was time I misbehaved at the office party, I didn't. Dammit.

Xmas function #2 was today. The family lunch. Not thank goodness the usual full turkey, ham, and plum pudding. BBQ and salads, good wines (can always rely on that at my brother's house) and all the family, with two new additions this year, my nephew from Sydney has moved down with his gorgeous French-Canadian wife. She works in a cheese store, and brought the cheese platter. French cheeses (funny that) - two goats cheese, a a semi-soft and a soft (delicious), a hard goats/sheeps cheese (very subtle, very yum) and a runny cows milk cheese that looked like a brie that had been wrapped in brown cardboard, but tasted like nothing I've ever had, incredibly smooth and creamy, with a slightly sharp edge and a taste that lingered and changed like a good wine. I declared it to be the new love of my life.
Traditionally it has been my task
to make the plum pudding. I got brave this year, and made plum pudding ice-cream instead. Far more sensible in a Melbourne summer. First try, and not entirely successful. It didn't exactly freeze properly, but tasted just like it was meant to, and went like a dream with the selection of berries my sister-in-law provided and the dessert wine my brother chose.
It was a wonderfully relaxed day, my brother unusually in a very chatty mood, the "kids" stealing my cigarettes. Memories of me not smoking in front of my mother when my nephew dragged me out to the back of the garden because he doesn't smoke in front of his father. My great nephew almost in tears because he thought we thought he'd been watching South Park, when we trying to tell him he should be watching it. Nice that my nephews asked me if I was seeing anyone - nice that they don't think I 'm too old for that, and nice that they want me to be seeing someone. Nice that we can all relax, because no-one is torn between seperated parents and getting kids off to their absent parent - that's why we do it the weekend before. No stress. It's OUR day. Nice that we can all talk about all the family that aren't around for Christmas any more, and talk without sadness, just remembering all those other Christmases when the family was bigger, and the kids really were kids, not the grown-ups and parents they are now. Nicest of all that for at least one day a year we can really be a family.