Once again I’m late with the Christmas wishes, so a very, merry, belated Christmas everyone! The kids and I are enjoying some very quiet days at Blue Sky at the moment while Matt is immersed in mango season madness. On the mango front, things are not as crazy as last year though so we did manage to have a pretty relaxed Christmas day and Boxing Day this year – much better than spending it in hospital as we did last Christmas!
As you know, we kicked off our Christmas festivities about a month ago when we headed out to choose our ‘real’ Christmas tree from the Christmas Tree farm, you can read all about that outing here. Next on the festive calendar was the local Christmas Carols night which the kids loved despite the fact that due to some iffy weather the carols were moved indoors and we were all hot, sweaty and crammed in to the local PCYC hall – not really the magical night we were hoping for but the kids enjoyed themselves nonetheless!
Fealy kids all dressed up for the local Christmas carols night.
After that was the usual end of school craziness with breakup parties to cook for and gifts for the kid’s teacher’s to be got! This year we decided to do some fruit baskets as gifts. They were not fancy as we used all of our ‘seconds’ fruit so they were not pretty but I am sure they still tasted great and I think the teacher’s liked them! We are trying to teach the kids about simple presents, next year I will be more organised and send the kids out foraging for the fruit themselves so they get a real sense of gift giving!
We were all sooooooo happy to see the school year end and were very happy with the kids school reports – hoooray for holidays! The kids cousin Caleb from townsville spent the first week of the holidays here at Blue Sky with us and he was quickly put to work in the packing shed! It wasn’t all work though – we did manage a lovely morning out at Davies Creek, a trip over to Malanda to the Majestic Theatre to see the movie ‘Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day!’ (which we all loved!) and surprised the Great Grandparents with some noisy kids with their lunch! We finished off the first week of the holidays with a couple of nights at Grammy & Grunda’s in Ravenshoe where the kids got to splash about in the creek, do lots of fun crafty stuff with Grammy, and have a lesson in how to build a maori taiaha (fighting stick) with Grunda.
After our first week of fun it was then in to the hard work of food preparation for Christmas and I roped in the Johnson cousies to help make yum yum balls and apricot balls. It was a little messy 🙂
Then, before we knew it, Christmas was here! On Christmas eve we had a small lunchtime bbq with about half of the workers who were still here at Blue Sky. We did of course have to have a very traditional ‘aussie’ pavlova dessert to show our international workers – it was topped with some delicious Blue Sky mango too! We then spent one of the nicest afternoons in a long time, with just our little family and the peace of a quiet farm, hiding out in the air-conditioning, playing UNO, listening to Christmas carols and doing some last minute food preparation. We kept the kids off the trampoline and away from the scooters and bikes to ensure a hospital-free Christmas!
Christmas day was a pretty quiet affair as most of the family had opted to stay at home this year or headed off to spend the day with the other side of the family. So it felt a little strange not to have crazy numbers of kids and adults everywhere and we certainly missed the chaos, but we all enjoyed a pretty relaxed day! I’ll let the photos do the talking!
On boxing day we headed up to Ben Avon Station to spend the day with the ‘Johnson’ side of the family. It was a great day. The kids have sooooo much fun up there and despite the fact that I had not brought any spare clothes with us, they ended up convincing Grandma and Grandad Bill to keep them overnight so they could have some more time swimming in the dam and hanging out with the Johnson cousies! Grandma took the photos below – it’s not hard to see why they wanted to stay!
Matt, Kipp and I made it home in time to check in some new workers and get the accommodation sorted for them in readiness of a 6am back to work day the next day. We then rustled up some leftovers for dinner and had a very early, very quiet night without the kids!
Kipp entertaining himself with the Christmas stockings – a favourite past time for him this year!
So, that was Christmas 2014 for us! A very relaxed, quiet time with family and lots of food – we’re still getting through the leftovers (which to be honest is one of my favourite parts of Christmas!). What did everybody else get up to? Do you have any Christmas tradtions to share? Our little Fealy Family is struggling a little bit to cement what our Christmas traditions are/should be and we’d love to hear what other people do!
Merry Christmas everyone and bring on 2015 I say!
Still looks like you had quite a few people around to celebrate the Christmas cheer. Kids are looking so cute and we can’t wait to come and visit. Let the chaos begin…..
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