Compared with previous years, this year was definitely one big game of "one of these things is not like the others"... mostly, kind of.
As I mentioned yesterday, at the 11th hour (being Thursday), once we knew the weather on Christmas Day was going to be, in a word, shitful, we decided to move Christmas Day from Ma's place to my place.
Initially this was going to include an early visit to La Cousina's, before packing up and heading down the road, but Ma decided (all on her own) to throw that in and not worry about it, given the weather.
I woke up pretty early, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5:30am, and rolled out of bed not long after to start getting ready. Just before I was about to jump in the shower my phone beeped to let me know someone had liked something on Twitter, turned out it was Owlgirl, so since I knew she was already awake (and I'm not really surprised, that girl is STUPID for Christmas), I messaged her with seasonal greetings before getting ready.
I think I ended up leaving here at around 6:15am (with the air-con already on)... which was good for two reasons, the lowest temperature that we had all day happened at 6:30am and there was hardly anyone else on the road.
So I made pretty good time, got to Ma's, spent a quick minute taking photos of the tree (because traditional), then loaded up the car and headed back down the road. Unfortunately there were more cars on the road by this stage, and annoyingly the cars I kept getting stuck behind wanted to do between 5 and 10km under the speed limit.
Anyway, we made it back here before it heated up too much, we stuck on Arthur Christmas (which I had already watched the night before as is my annual Christmas Eve tradition) and I made the usual Christmas breakfast of croissants, this year with cheese and ham, nicely flattened in the George Foreman.
With not having the visit to La Cousina's to take up a goodly chunk of the morning, we kind of just faffed about watching the movie, getting Christmas texts (and, in my case, the occasional Snapchat) from people, including some photos of my new "second niece" (and by new I mean 7 months old at this stage... because my family does like to keep secrets from each other), who is so adorable I just want to eat her up, even if she does have a really badly spelled "upmarket bogan" name.
Eventually it was time for presents.
Mostly because I knew pretty much all but one of the things that were in my parcels (and because about half of them were things I bought for myself that I then subsequently put away for Christmas), I just watched Ma open her stuff for a bit and then slowly started to open my stuff.
- Sunnylife neon rainbow light
- Lego Dimensions
- Fantastic Beasts Story Pack
- Adventure Time Finn Level Pack
- Adventure Time Jake and Lumpy Space Princess Team Pack
- Adventure Time Marceline Fun Pack
- Harry Potter Harry and Voldemort Team Pack
- 2017 Warwick Rowers calendar
- 2017 Alfredo Roagui calendar and print
- R2D2 glass
- Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them book/screenplay
- DVDs
- The Lego Movie (Bluray)
- The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (Bluray)
- 101 Dalmations
- Finding Dory
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Kubo and the Two Strings
- The Martian
- The Song of the Sea
- Uncharted 4: A Thief's End PS4 game
- Lilo and Stitch "Ohana Means Family" statue
Ma liked all of her stuff, especially the Erstwilder snowman brooch and the calendar.
Once we were done with that I tidied up and then started on prep for lunch. And unlike previous years where I do half of the stuff and Ma does the other half, this year it was all me (for obvious reasons). Also, the fact that we were cooking in an actual oven with clearly regulated temperature rather than the Weber which is subject to it's own whims and idiosyncrasies meant that everything was cooked on time and well.
It's also useful that I have the comedy oversized oven as well, since everything (turkey, sausage meat and potatoes) fit in with room to spare.
And I think it was just after 1pm when we sat down for lunch, which is impressive given past performances.
As usual, I made twice as much as we actually needed, but it looked quite pretty and festive and was chock full of meat (the aforementioned turkey and sausage plus bacon). And I'd been tossing up whether or not to put together my own dressing but in the end I used the mango, lime and chilli dressing we've used before.
The table wasn't quite as interesting as it has been in previous years, since we didn't bring all the fancy stuff with us from Ma's, and my table is pretty tiny... so essentially we just used my regular old bowls... but the salad bowl is new and pretty nice for a $10 impulse buy from Kmart I have to say.
We put one of Ma's DVDs, Pom Poko on after lunch and somewhere towards the end of the movie I made some dessert... the mince pie icecream I put together along with crushed up meringues and some fresh raspberries, blueberries, strawberries and blackberries... which was pretty nice.
The rest of the afternoon was a bit general and a bit blah... given that Ma was staying here overnight there wasn't the usual "pack up and go" portion of the afternoon, which would probably have occurred at some point.
We ended up watching some random TV, I put together the minifigures from my Dimension sets, but otherwise nothing overly exciting... eventually I put together a plate of stuff for dinner from the leftovers. And as usual, we kind of picked at it until we'd had enough.
We finished off the day by watching one of my new DVDs, Song of the Sea, and at a certain point decided to inflate the mattress so it was done.
You would assume if a mattress and a pump are made by the same company that they would not only fit together, but that they would be made to lock into place with each other. Not this mattress... while the pump goes into the inflation point, it doesn't actual lock together with it. Annoying. Also it look longer and wasn't as easy as I though... but really it's my own fault because I could have bought an electric one, but no, I bought the foot powered version.
Ma want to bed around 9:30 and was quietly snoring away by about 11 or so... I gave up and crashed out at around midnight.
I will say that I didn't sleep great... weirdly both Ma and I woke up at 2am... and then after that I had a really hard time getting back to sleep. I think part of it may have been that the mattress stretched out a little like the instructions said it was going to and it wasn't as firm as it needed to be... also it's really hard to get in or out of easily. But mostly it just wasn't my regular mattress so that was weird.
I'm pretty sure I dozed on and off and then woke up around 4:30 and realised that the cool change had come in, so I turned off the air-con and opened a couple of windows.
And then I woke up when my alarm went off... because I'd forgotten to switch them all off. This morning wasn't much of anything... we packed things up ready to take back to Ma's place, I made the other two croissants up with the leftover ham and cheese, I had a quick shower and then we headed down the road.
So, like I said, while it will be a memorable Christmas just because we did things at my place rather than Ma's, it was otherwise fairly uneventful.
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