our first holiday together alone.

Well it’s finally here, my first holiday away from family.  I’ve spent every Christmas for the past 28 years enjoying the traditions, old and new, that my family has developed through the years, but this 29th year all that changed.  For the first time, Candice and I were solely responsible for deciding how we were going to spend our time, and to begin the process of developing traditions in our new family.  It was an exciting and daunting prospect, full of much hope and ultimately bringing us closer together.

Over the weekend we decided to sit down together and make a list of the things we wanted to accomplish over the holiday.  The first few days leading up to Christmas were looking good, with enough to keep us occupied but not enough for us to be overwhelmed.  We spent the weekend and first part of the week running a few errands, watching holiday movies on TV, looking up recipes to try out together, and exploring a bit of our new neighborhood.

On Christmas Eve the weather took a turn for the better, so we decided to take a trip to the Royal Botanic Gardens.  The gardens are full of flora from all different parts of the world, with different sections dedicated to different regions.  There was a plethora of local Australian plants, but also areas dedicated to the local plants of Southeast Asia and California.  In addition to all the plants, including a vast assortment of cacti (cactuses? cactopods?), we managed to see some local fauna as well.  We spotted kookaburras, ducks, and a black swan, which to our disappointment looked nothing like Natalie Portman.

After our trip to the gardens, we looked up the various Christmas Eve services in town, and found the Brass on the Grass service that caught our attention.  We decided to head over early to make sure we could get in, having no real idea of how big the event would be.  When we showed up 15 minutes early the crowd consisted of about 25 people, and it became instantly clear that this was not the Myer carol special (more on that later).  It turned out to be a really nice little service at a small Lutheran church, consisting of a brass quintet playing carols for 30 minutes, then an official service of carols, scripture readings, and poems read in olde English (which sounds awesome when read aloud in an Australian accent).

Following the service we made our way home to bake Christmas cookies and see what fun holiday specials might be on TV.  Earlier in the day, while making our way to the gardens, we had seen a lot of people camped out in line at the Myer Music Bowl for “Carol’s by Candelight.”  We had no idea what that might be, other than an example of questionable grammar, but it turns out it is the event on Christmas Eve.  It is broadcast nationally across Australia, and is a massive production consisting of popular carols sung by Australia’s biggest music stars.  Part of me was a bit sad that we hadn’t decided to go, but considering people were lined up before noon and the concert didn’t start until 7, I think enjoying it from the comfort of our home was preferable.

I baked and frosted the cookies; Candice accidentally frosted the floor.

On Christmas morning we woke up early to open the few presents we received from my Mom & sisters and our friend Sean, and then talked with my Dad on FaceTime before we headed to the Zoo.  Our local friend Anne had informed us that the Zoo was a great thing to do on Christmas as it wasn’t very crowded and was one of the few things open.  We also discovered that all public transport travel is free on Christmas day, so a trip to the Zoo it was!  The Zoo is pretty comparable to your average large zoo in a major city, and contains much more than we could see in a single day.  So we purchased an annual pass, which gets us into the 3 big Melbourne zoos, and decided to focus our first visit on the local Australian wildlife.  We saw koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, emus, kookaburras, and our first platypus!  It was smaller than we expected, only about a foot long, but was definitely one of the highlights for me. For dinner that night we cooked up a feast of local Australian fish, green bean casserole, and fresh baked bread, and exchanged the little gifts we had gotten for each other.

The next day we celebrated our first ever Boxing Day by connecting with our families on FaceTime, then going shopping!  Boxing Day is a bit like black Friday in the US, in that every store has crazy sales and open early, but it’s in Australia so everyone is much more polite and patient.  We managed to find a few kitchen items we had been looking for, and also checked out the brand new Melbourne Star, which is a giant observation wheel that takes 30 minutes to complete one rotation.  We decided against taking a ride this time, but they do have a nice deal where you can get a ticket to go during the day and again at night for only a few dollars more than a single trip.

Totoro helps us use FaceTime properly.

The rest of the week was spent in a state of relaxation as we enjoyed the time off together, took some trips into the city, watched some movies we checked out from the library, and experimented with more recipes (most of which turned out edible, but it’s obvious that I still have a lot to learn about cooking something other than boxed pasta).  On Saturday the 28th we saw that the weather was going to be in the 90’s, so we took our first trip to the beach.  We went to a beach town suburb of Melbourne called St. Kilda, had a delicious brunch at a little Greek restaurant, then setup our towel on the sand and spent the afternoon sun bathing and doing a bit of swimming in the bay.  It was quite wonderful.

St. Kilda beach

Throughout all this holiday time, we have been continually commenting to each other that it doesn’t feel like the holidays.  I’ve never had a Christmas with warm weather, and in many ways it hasn’t felt like the holidays because I haven’t been spending it with family and friends.  All I know is that despite the distance and despite the sadness we feel to be away from so many people during this season, we have begun to make our own traditions that we can look forward to and build on year after year.  

BK