The Calendar app on my phone has taken over from the small paper appointment diary I used to carry in my purse. Plans for December include:

• get together with some of Richard’s uni flatmates on Friday 9th
• Christmas scrapbooking session in Featherston on Saturday 10th
• get  together with friends from my ante-natal class on Wednesday 14th (we met nearly 26 years ago, before our first babies)
• Infrastructure Group Christmas dinner at the Pukemanu Hotel on Friday 16th

That looks like quite enough to me!

It’s hard to choose “the most perfect gift ever received”, but the “Sevilo” plaque, handmade by Rose, that we received for Christmas 2005 must be one of them. The families gathered at Kaitoke park in mid January to “do Christmas”. When Rose presented the heavy parcel to Richard & me as our joint present we had no idea what was inside. The sign (featuring our property name – derived by spelling ‘olives’ backwards) was beautifully designed and featured my favourite colour combination (yellow & blue). It must have taken Rose many hours of patient work to complete. The sign hung on the side of the garage at Fantail Grove until we sold and moved away mid-year 2016, but we didn’t sell the name “Sevilo”, which has come with us. We are building a garage at our new place, and surely we’ll find a good place to install the plaque so that visitors will always be sure where they are.

For me the approach to Christmas is inexorably tangled with the arrival of summer:

• roses blooming in the garden,
• the demand to complete the staff summer holiday leave plan comes out from the CEO,
• strawberry punnets are available at 2 for $5,
• the Summer Reading Programme staffer is at work & the library is decorated to the theme (yachts this year),
• finding lists everywhere (other people’s in books and on tables at work; my own in various bags and piles at home),
• boxes of Christmas books are out for borrowing in the Children’s library,
• Greytown shops (and the library) have their swags of evergreens and lights hung from verandahs,

and there’s a feeling in the air of suppressed excitement and anticipation that makes me happy.

I plan to take a few minutes each day of December to follow along with the Journal your Christmas prompts from Shimelle.

Christmas Manifesto 2016
This Christmas was always going to be different, as we have moved house from a large home with room for lots of Christmas decorations & entertaining to a very small cottage with Christmas supplies in deep storage. In addition our son will be in the South Island for the holiday. We decided to embrace this and make it more different still by arranging an away-from-home Christmas, for just the two of us. However, within all this difference I will retain the joy, generosity, anticipation and delight of Christmases past, as well as enjoying the pleasures of the new.