Pesents, food, presents, alcohol and presents... and Jesus and stuff too...

Christmas has come and gone again, and once more there was waaaay too much fantastic food, lots of time with family and friends and probably more alcohol consumed than is good for us.

We managed a record 4 Christmases this year, with the first being the Spanish Christmas Eve celebrated with Carmen's folks. Her bro was still in WA (having recently started working in a copper mine somewhere called "Nifty"), so it was her folks, myself, Carms (duh), her grandparents and a couple of friends of the family. The food was great as always (both Carms' folks are awesome cooks) and everyone got as good as they gave. We scored a couple of very pretty glass vases, some soft-but-itchy throw rugs for our new sofas and a 24 bottle wine fridge/cooler thing.

Then it was on to my Mum and Dad's for Christmas Day. There we had my folks, my grandpa and Cal. We also had a drop-in from Anne (Cal's new girlfriend [also my workmate, about more later]) and Carmen's folks again. The fine food theme was repeated, with Mum making the best Christmas pudding she has in ages. It was phenomenal. Also repeated was the getting as good as giving theme. Mum loved her froggy brooch, Grandpa loved his DVDs, Dad loved his books and Cal played with his steering-wheel-and-pedals thing and his Xbox wasn't even there.

As for Boxing Day, many wonderful friends came over to our house and we had a great deal of fun. Again, there was a large amount of alcohol, including my "Special Punch". By "Special", you can of course read "really strong but doesn't taste that alcoholic". There was laughter and friendly and not-so-friendly (but still very funny) ribbing and generally the day/night (started at 1100 and wnet through til around 2230) was a great success. It was one of those gatherings that reminds me that Carms and I have some of the best friends in the world. It was awesome!

Finally, Carm's bro returned to Canberra and so we had a special Michael Christmas (not to be confused with Michaelmas, which I thought was around this time of year, but I was wrong). He was sooooo very tired when we came, as he'd been awake for about 36 hours at the time. He gave me the Scarface, Carmen a great deal of "Northern Exposure" on DVD and was given by his folks a freakin' cool portable DVD player. More great food. More alcohol (tho not drunk by me 'cause I was driving).

I'd like to thank everyone who helped make this Christmas so wonderful, and I hope that everyone out there had a fantastic, culturally-appropriate end of year break and gathering(s).