Family,Friends and Facebook

What I want for Christmas is my family.

It's been the real meaning of Christmas for me for as long as I can remember.

I believe I'd be lying however if I didn't admit that Barbie dolls and the many accessories featured strongly on my want list and yes, I've still got them in a box downstairs! 

But the pre-Christmas joy of pudding making and Christmas cake baking was    the prelude to the season and even though our family group was small we had our rituals, it was Christmas.

 We planted three-penny bits in elderly relatives pieces of pudding, so they could be the ones to have good luck, unluckily some three-pennies were never discovered, the rest of us kept the secret and spent the rest of Christmas Day ready to rush them off to hospital if necessary. Nobody seemed to think putting choking hazards in food was a bad idea! Oh, for the old days.

My family grew hugely when I married into a big immigrant family and my Christmas experience changed. Now, it's overflowing platters of food that never seem to decrease instead of a turkey dinner and roast veggies.

40 people instead of 8 and food sent home with you that lasts well past Boxing Day. 

The family grows and changes year by year and like most modern families with grownup children I've experienced the strange connected/ disconnected feeling of communicating with children and friends overseas through Facebook. I'm knowing more easily and more often what they're doing but I'm lulled into forgetfulness about how long it's actually been since I've seen them in person.

Will it really be over a year since I saw my son?, no, I was lucky enough to see him 10 months ago, see I only just remembered.

Will the joy of receiving updates about their travels through Facebook replace a day spent as a family eating the same foods and doing the same things as we did last year? I don't know, but I wouldn't do away with the ease of making an embarrassingly, motherly comment at arms ( thousands of miles) length to a Facebook post, such fun.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.

Birthdays are difficult or your nobody till somebody loves you

Birthdays, for me at least, have always been something to look forward to.

The kid inside squirms and wriggles in anticipation, not for presents like the kid long gone would have expected but for the contact with my family and friends.

So when I had the opportunity to catch up for a pre-birthday lunch with my cousins came about it was wonderful,especially as they announced good news about recovery from an illness.

I realised the endless years of family occasions stretching ahead of us, opportunities to connect and rejoice in life's milestones is reaching its end.

We almost burst with the joy, filling each other in about our and our children's experiences in the last year, our plans and hopes for the future and our niggling worries and fears.

You see we were each talking to someone who knew us, had know us all our life, loved our mother and father, had the same grandparents, we had experienced a lot of life together.

It was wonderful but poignant when amidst the chatter we both felt like we had to unburden ourselves of secrets that we had been sworn to keep, in my cousins case since she was 13. She had discussed it with her husband a few years ago, asking if she should reveal to my brother, who she very rarely saw, at my mothers funeral, this burdensome piece of rumour/fact. She never did and now she felt she had to tell me.

So you see, we had both been mulling over the "big" issues and the aura of birthdays as turning points in a year and in your life ,created this opportunity.

The squirming, wriggling kid intuitively knows that and for good or bad can't wait to see what happens, remember kids love fireworks.

Today, my birthday, has sent me lots of birthday wishes, even photos of a new baby , so sweet and happy, smiling her way to her next milestone , her first birthday.

How and why we work.

For the last few years I've been trying to create the lifestyle I want.

I think it's important to dream and dream big but financially the last decade has hammered lots of us with lost superannuation, decreasing job opportunities and the icing on the cake, we get to work till 70 before we can get a miserly pension to top up the dissapeared superannuation I talked about earlier.

So, I packed my bags , moved onto a yacht and basically thought it would be more traveling and less working.

I was wrong and ended up moving to more remote and distant places then I ever imagined ( being a city girl at heart ) and also with and without my partner which has been difficult to say the least.

My pre-New Year commitment is to work smarter, live better.

Stay tuned.