Christmas 2014 Part 2: Christmas and (too much) snow

I made a Facebook comment on Christmas Day about smiling on a green Christmas.  This is what I got 24 hours later.

We got our road trip in with the excursions to Moreton, Stratford, and Solihull during the first half of the Christmas week.  The remainder of the time before we headed north to Cumbria was, for the most part, spent relaxing at home.  There were a couple notable things - many having to do with the girls' creativity, and one having to do with unwanted weather.  Here's the recap.

Our neighbor runs the charity shop in Melbourne.  We've benefited many times from her generosity, as she'll drop by to ask Kristine if such-and-such an item that she's just received would be of any use. We get a good deal on useful items, and she gets double income since they'll show up for sale in her shop again when we leave.  Our Christmas tree is one of those items.  Kristine and Clare decorated it one day while I was at work and the older girls were at school.

Here's the final result.  The tree did suffer a little from a certain exploring 3 yr old who pulled up the skirt and looked underneath for gifts.  We'll just say that the tree wasn't standing this straight by the end of the holiday.

Elise and Clare busied themselves making additional decorations while Charis and I picked up my parents from the airport.

Because it was a holiday and the grownups joined in, the games mostly resembled the games that the associated rule book described.  That didn't mean the grownups and any more success against the girls though.  Here are my parents getting whipped in Uno.

Puzzles and reading - popular holiday activities for us that my parents graciously joined

Kristine's been planning to get these hats for the girls for quite a while.  Full head covering, hand muffs, and clever animal persona.  What's not to like.  Here's Clare, channeling her best Fang of Dang look from Andrew Peterson's Wingfeather Saga.

We read the Christmas story and sang a few carols on Christmas morning before the gift exchange.  Notice my slippers please.  I've taken some flack for wearing my UConn sweatshirt over here.  I'd like the record to show that my utilitarian acceptance of college gear does not exclude Purdue.

One aspect I've appreciated most about the church we attend in Derby is their intentional efforts to integrate children into the worship service with adults (instead of sending them to a different building or asking them to behave like adults during the service).  Charis and Clare led us through the motions for Colin Buchanan's "On that very first Christmas" - one of the songs we've learned over here.

Hosting guests, especially guests who share our commitment to the social importance of hot drinks, is not complete without giving them real tea to take back to the US.

Somebody gave Clare a Peppa Pig book.  Clare was thrilled.  I tried to appreciate the considerate exposure to a popular UK children's character.  Having read the book with her, I'm still working hard to nurture that sense of appreciation.  I will appreciate it.  I will not recycle the book as a waste of paper and ink.  I will not ...

Our Christmas dinner had an eclectic mix of people - us, my parents from Minneapolis, another secondee couple from Melbourne, and my Rolls-Royce colleague who planted the seeds for our trip to Turkey.  We tried to pay appropriate homage to UK Christmas culinary traditions by including a flaming pudding with dessert.  The YouTube video swears it's dead-easy to do.  Light a candle, pour some whiskey in a ladle, heat the ladle over the candle, and pour the now flaming whiskey over the pudding.  Execution didn't exactly match theory, although a few people said they did see flames.  Maybe the YouTube video forgot to say that you need to do this in a dark room instead of conservatory on a sunny afternoon.

I realized as I enjoyed the view of the lovely green fields around Melbourne that this is just my third Christmas in the last 20 years which didn't involve snow and ice (or at least the threat of it).  The other two were when I surprised my parents in Nairobi in 1995, and when we gathered at my brother and sister-in-law's home in Austin in 2003.  I wrote a Facebook post about smiling on a green Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.  Within 24 hours, this was the view out our front door.  My local friends, who had been telling me for several weeks how much they hoped the weather prognosticators' forecasts for a white Christmas would be true, were thrilled.  I was not.

The total snowfall was a couple of inches (maybe 4-5 cm).  We made it through some very deserted streets to the Melbourne Tea Rooms for a lovely breakfast.  Kristine and Clare have been there several times, but it was a first for the rest of us.  The birds at the pond certainly didn't seem to think that the recent snowpocalypse justified people not coming out to feed them.

Kristine and the girls at the pond after the snowicane

Our last excursion was to the Breedon Priory Church.  The site dates back to the 7th century, although the current building "only" dates to the 13th century.  This has been on our to-do list for a while.  We thought we'd use my parents' presence as an excuse to finally get up there and look around the inside (which supposedly has quite a collection of Saxon-era sculptures).  Our visit turned out to be on a rare day that the church building was locked, so we had to content ourselves with exploring the grounds. 

The girls, who truthfully never would have been particularly interested in the historic sculptures, were thrilled to be in a field of snow.  More specifically, they were thrilled to have snow that they could throw at their father.

In fact, they seemed to think that was the only reason we'd made the outing to the church.

They did eventually lose interest in throwing snowballs (okay, maybe they just decided to heed the command of a powerfully authoritative father).  They spent time happily wandering the cemetery until Clare's feet started to get cold.  Then they invented a game that involved the older two girls breaking trail for "Her Majesty the Clare" so that she could walk in snow that was less deep.  This occupied their time for quite a while, and resulted in many new paths through the cemetery.

Here's a final shot from our Christmas holiday at home.  My father-in-law gave the girls a nerf American football several years ago.  He's concerned, for some (unexplainable) reason, that my lack of interest in the sport might translate into his granddaughters not being familiar with it.  The football made the trek to Melbourne with us at the beginning of 2014.  Over the course of 2014, the girls learned a game here called piggy-in-the-middle.  The started playing one evening after dinner with the football.  It clicked to someone (either Elise or Charis) that this football is supposed to get hiked from one person to another.  So they decided that the people not in the middle should hike the ball to each other while the piggy tried to get it.  Then they decided it would be more fun if the all assumed a hike position and just called it upside-down piggy-in-the-middle.  I was greatly amused.  I'll let my father-in-law decide if this is sacrilegious use of a football or not.

Christmas 2014 Part 1: Melbourne, Shakespeare, and some Family Roots

Shakespeare's Birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon

The girls had two weeks off school for the Christmas holiday.  I combined a couple vacation days with the Rolls-Royce Derby shut-down to get the same time off.  I thought before the holiday started that it would be relatively low-key.  We'd pick my parents up at the Manchester airport, and spend an appropriately paced holiday for a family with young children that we didn't want to wear out (yes, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it).  On writing it up though, it was actually quite eventful.  Here's the first part.

My holiday jump-started when I was on my bike cycling home by the unusually early hour of 4:30 pm.  It was still a ride home in the dark, but I was home early enough to join the session of Christmas carols around the tree in the village that the Melbourne Rotary Club organized.  Members of the town band and training band provided accompaniment.  It was cold, but thankfully not rainy.  That's me on the trombone to the left of the door with lights on.

Here's the tree that we sang and played around.  The kind folks at the Methodist church across the street offered refreshments for those of us who were semi-frozen by the time the caroling was done.

Despite flying United through Newark airport, my parents had an uneventful flight to the UK.  Charis and I collected them at the Manchester airport.  Sunday evening we made a short visit to Calke Abbey, which had a number of decorations and festivities going for the holiday.  It was the first time I've been in the chapel on the estate.  They set up floodlights from the outside so the stain glass window was illuminated.

I think the girls enjoyed the colored floodlights on the trees more than the ones at the chapel though.

Obligatory fuzzy photo so I can lament my iPhone's mercurial camera and my brother can lobby for a trip over here so he can show me how to use it.

On Monday, we met cousins at the Manor Hotel in Moreton-in-Marsh.  The cousins took my parents for a night while the rest of us went to Stratford.  The Manor Hotel is a a high class establishment with excellent food.  And, more importantly, they provided crackers (poppers for my US readers) with toys inside that kept little ones mostly busy and cheerful.

We stayed in the family suite of the Brook Lodge in Stratford.  Elise shared a room with Kristine and I.  She got her own bed with reading light, and we let her stay up with us.  She decided to spend time writing clever captions for the photos about our trip to Turkey.

She was less than thrilled to realize I'd captured her activities on camera.

But her reprimand was short lived, as she began giggling in self-congratulation about a particular caption that involved high praise for her (great and powerful Elise) and poked fun at me (jealous Daddy).

Kristine happily knitted.

Here's the room Charis and Clare shared.  Charis got the bed, and Clare got the sleeping bag.

Our morning excursion before picking up my parents again in Moreton was to Shakespeare's birthplace and family home.

There's a small museum between the ticket desk and the house.  The film on this wall had some narrative about Shakespeare, as well as visuals of how his plays have been adapted around the world. I hadn't realized there's a hip-hop group dedicated solely to Shakespeare.

I guess it's not truly high culture until it's been interpreted by the Simpsons?

The sight of the girls running is becoming a familiar one.

The house had several displays showing food that the Shakespeares would have eaten.

They also had an activity to "smell and guess" the contents of a couple bags of food ingredients.

Motion shot of the girls looking at leather gloves in the tannery where Shakespeare's father worked and taught his apprentices.

A trio of guides in what would have been the girls' bedroom (notable facts included that it was directly over the tannery and had no beds because only boys got beds) got Elise and Charis to act out part of the play that's performed during A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Elise, dressed as the prince, was trying out her sword.  She didn't realize yet that Charis, dressed as the princess, was supposed to be someone she wooed, not someone she fought.

During the play, a lion (Clare refused to take part, so one of the guides did it) chases the princess, who flees but leaves behind a bloody cloak.  The prince, on seeing the cloak, presumes his true love has died.  He is stricken with grief and stabs himself in anguish (or, in Elise's case, with a smile on his face).

The princess, on discovering her true love is dead, stabs herself in grief as well.  Which results in the prince rising up one more time so that he and the princess can die together.

We walked from the house into the extension where Shakespeare built a pub.  That doorway behind us is not short because of any camera angles.  It's really that short.  It evidently (barely) met the building code requirements at the time, as Shakespeare didn't want to spend any more money than he had to on such frivolous things as helping guests not bang their heads.

Another experiment with heeding Elise's command to look properly serious.

Tour of the house complete, we grabbed lunch at the Henley Tea Shop.  To Elise's great delight, one wall was papered with a book theme.

Rendezvous with my parents complete, one car made a detour through Solihull to explore my Dad's roots. We stopped at the house where he was born, which he got to see for the first time.  Evidently some Americans who do genealogical research in the UK think nothing of knocking on doors and requesting tours of homes that they believe they have a connection to.  We settled for a photo from the sidewalk.

Obligatory fish and chips meal with guests.  Note the enthusiastic response (it might have had something to do with the smashed peas posing as vegetables).

Fred and Ted the Zucchinis

There once was a zucchini named Fred
Who was left on the sidewalk for dead
But was picked up by a family
Who said "Now, really,
This zucchini would make quite lovely bread."

And so began a valiant, albeit brief, battle for survival.  For Fred was quite large, and did not want being left for dead to finish with actually becoming dead.  Fred, however, did not reckon with Elise's valor.  Moreover, he completely discounted the power of the knife in Elise's hands.

Thus Fred the Green, and his compatriot Ted the Yellow, were swiftly dispatched by Elise and her knife.

Indeed, having felt the thrill of vanquishing zucchini, Elise added more victims to her tally.

Elise switched roles from conqueror of zucchini to apprentice baker.  This latter role is one she has grown into quite well over the last year.  Indeed, there are days when the apprentice begins to lessen the work of the master.

The apprentice has spectators.

The most important ingredient is added to the mix.

 Elise's observers become helpers as the preparation nears completion.

Elise completes the pre-baking labor.

The standard chocolate tax is reserved for the master of the house.

The zucchinis formerly known as Fred and Ted emerge from the oven as a lovely bread.

Which is eagerly dispatched by three cheerful daughters enjoying a Saturday afternoon snack.