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.