Christmas Countdown

Tonight Katie and I had a little fun with the makeup. Is makeup one word, makeup, or two words, make-up? Either way turning her into a glamour queen was fun . . .

I can hardly believe that we leave for the South Island on Monday! It really doesn't feel like Christmas to me - despite the Christmas parade the girls were in, the Christmas show for Musical Stars, the Christmas music occasionally on the radio. . .it's just hard to get my head around it being Christmas and summer. What it does feel like is when I went to summer camp in North Carolina and we would celebrate "Christmas in July".  Having grown up in Florida I'm quite used to warm weather in December, but I've missed all the familiar things leading up to Christmas, namely Thanksgiving, and even though it wasn't cold, per se, in Florida, it was cold-er. Not warmer. So it's still weird. 

The biggest benefit of this difference is that I'm not even very homesick. I've only spent one Christmas away from my family and it was horrible. We stayed in Texas and I got terribly depressed when on Christmas Eve our little family had dinner at Chili's after church. Then, on Christmas day I was so sad that we packed up everyone and went to Dallas to spend the night and shop the sales the next day. Memorable, but not in a good way. This year I'm really excited that even though we are far from my family, we will be with the Morrisons. I think the reason being in Texas that year was so difficult is simply that we were all alone. We had precious friends but Christmas is a time for family and we were away from ours and it was sad. I'm not anticipating any loneliness this year as there is quite a crew assembling at Kate and Ant's house in Wanaka, I'm very excited about it!

The girls are handling it all so well. I feel like I'm a bad mom for neglecting so many of our annual holiday traditions, but they are taking it all in stride and can hardly wait to go on the ferry and then see the family. Ours are the only small children going, which is quite a different affair than Christmases past. On my side of the family Meggie, at 9, is the oldest cousin of 14, but here in New Zealand she and her sisters are the youngest of 18. Six of their cousins will be in attendance at Wanaka, but Emily at 16 is the one closest in age to the girls. They adore Emily and all their boy-cousins, so much so that Dugald and I will have to protect the others from too much attention from our young brood.

We may be off-line while we are down there, I don't anticipate access to a computer for blog updates and Facebook checks. . . which might be a good thing for me anyway, a sort of fast. I'm not really good at fasting so I might see if I can get Dugald's laptop to take with me. We'll see. Anyway, if I don't blog until after the holidays Merry Christmas!! I'm sure I'll have gobs of pictures to upload when we return.