My white Christmas

I’ve been wandering down memory lane since writing my blog about meeting the real Santa while we were living in New York.

Looking at those old pictures prompted me to search for the photos of our white Christmas … those sweet little faces!

Then I remembered that long before HouseGoesHome, I had a blog called Mother Lode.

It was for a magazine called Wondertime and I wrote a post for its website once a week about expat life in New York with two small children.

So I dug around in the depths of my computer and found two festive posts, plus a gallery of pics from those chilly weeks.

Grab yourself a cuppa because this is looooooong. Sorry!

First off: a blog about how freaking cold it was …

When I lived in Australia, I thought fashion designers put hoods on jackets for purely decorative purposes. I actually found them a bit annoying, all that loose fabric flapping around.

Zips and buttons on jackets were another novelty. If I fell in love with a too-small jacket in the sales, I’d still buy it, because I never did my jackets up anyway.

It was -6C in New York today, during daylight hours. I wore my hood, I zipped up my jacket, I put another jacket over the top of it, I zipped it up too. I put on gloves and a scarf. I wore knee-high books with furry lining.

I was still cold.  I asked another mother from the preschool if it gets colder than this. She laughed and said, “Oh yes, much, much colder!”

I can’t wait. Brrrrrr.

The kids hate it. Ruby just wants to stay home all the time. When we go out, she complains that her face hurts. She takes a stuffed teddy bear with her to use as a nose shield.

As a result, we are doing lots of sitting around on the lounge room floor building Duplo treehouses, farms, boats and airplanes. Or the Polly Pocket dolls hang out in the toy pool that Ruby got for her birthday. It’s nice and warm in our apartment, so the Pollys don’t mind wearing their swimsuits and splashing about. I, on the other hand, may scream if I am forced to speak in a fake American accent one more time as I admire all the other Polly Pockets’ shoes.

However, as I was the mad fool who bought her all the stuff in the first place, I only have myself to blame.

I’ve actually (shamefully) found myself asking if she’d like to watch a DVD so I can have a break. But she usually turns me down. I should feel proud that my child would rather indulge in imaginative play than be glued to the DVD player, shouldn’t I?

I forced the kids out of the house this afternoon to go to the library and borrow some books. What a miserable old trip that was, hustling along the street with two grumpy little ones in tow.

I pointed out a few slushy piles of snow in gutters to the girls as we walked. They haven’t seen the snow falling yet. It tends to do that after they’ve gone to sleep. My husband and I were invited to a party in Brooklyn on Saturday night and as we were leaving, magical snowflakes were fluttering around us. It was beautiful.

So was the venue for the party. It was hosted by a university professor who owns a big brownstone terrace. There was a Moroccan love seat in one room that was (apparently) built by a carpenter flown in from Morocco for the task. It was nice to see how the other half – who aren’t squashed into tiny apartments in Manhattan – live. Very well, it would seem.

Back in our tiny apartment, preparations for Christmas are proceeding apace. The Christmas tree has been decked out in plastic glow-in-the-dark ghosts that came free in the mail with a kids’ magazine. Not your traditional festive ornamentation, but nice and cheap. I’ve also been experimenting with pom-poms made out of shredded plastic bags. Not quite so successful.

We’re off to Macy’s to splurge on an ornament tomorrow, an angel for the top of the tree. That is, if we can bring ourselves to leave the apartment …

And here are some pics to break up all that text …

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And this one’s about Christmas Day …

After spending months prepping for Christmas with my new best friend www.amazon.com, I was blindsided at the last moment by illness. Ava came down with a nasty virus on Christmas Eve and passed it straight on to me, so I had the dubious pleasure of watching my symptoms unfold in advance. Knowing that the next 24 hours would bring a barking cough, vomiting and misery was a little too much information.

Christmas morning dawned to the sound of Ava tottering into our bedroom and demanding, between coughs, to watch some TV. She then staggered to the lounge room and clambered onto the sofa between two chockablock Santa sacks and sat, feverishly unaware, between them.

I was tempted to laugh, but I felt too sorry for her, with her wan, white little face. What a miserable way to spend her third Christmas Day. She rallied bravely to unpack her booty, but couldn’t bring herself to scoff any of the sweet treats inside.

“Too sick, put in fridge for later,” she sighed.

Her face brightened when Santa came through with her requested dolly, and she hasn’t let it out of her sight since unpacking it. The same goes for Ruby’s Beach Barbie, who now goes everywhere with her, even the bath.

Beach Barbie, however, missed out on the “favourite present” spot. That went to a small, virulent green, vacuum-packed fluffy thing called a Schnooks that my sister sent from Australia. Who’d have guessed it?

While Husband and the kids turned their hands to the make-your-own gingerbread house I’d picked up at Target, I popped some headache tablets and set about making Christmas lunch – roast chicken, garlic spinach, corn on the cob and oven-baked chips. Weeks before, as I’d debated the menu, I’d been fascinated to discover I could purchase a “turkducken” from my local grocery delivery service. A turkducken is a turkey stuffed with a duck that has in turn been stuffed with a chicken. The price tag – $95 – immediately put the kibosh on that idea, so I turned to the turkey section instead. An enormous $35 turkey seemed like overkill for our little family, as did a goose (I’ve always wanted to try goose, I have a bizarre fascination with obscure roasted birds), so I settled on an antibiotic-free chook instead.

At noon, I cranked up a crappy Christmas CD and we sat down with a couple of bottles of bubbly – sparkling apple juice for the girls, sparkling Spanish wine for the grown-ups – some Christmas crackers (a little hard to source, as they are apparently a “British” tradition, the same goes for plum pudding – Americans are really missing out!) and picked our way through our lunch.

But something was missing. It soon became apparent that it’s not what you serve on Christmas Day that makes the meal special, it’s the people you share it with. Christmas lunch needs to be noisy and shambolic and spent with as many extended family members as possible. Without that atmosphere, it’s just another meal.

So, conversation during our meal revolved mainly around what we’ll do for Christmas next year, how we’ll invite as many members of both our families to the table as we can. We’ll feast on prawns and salad, the kids will all chase each other around the table and laughter will fill the air …

Cue another wave of homesickness to wash over me …

Song of the day: Bing Crosby & Frank Sinatra “White Christmas”