Christmas Day

It was a pretty good day today, spent with family and friends.

When I was little we used to get stockings with presents from Santa as well as individual gifts from everyone in the family. Our stockings were big pillowcases with a picture of Santa printed on the side instead of the more traditional stocking. But once Spark finished school that tradition ended, we're too grown up for stockings.

I woke up this morning and walked into the family room and found a massive stocking full to the brim with pressies! My mum had made stockings for us all?! And then I woke up. I lay in my bed for a moment before thinking "I guess this means we don't get a stocking..."

I got some good pressies in the end. A ben harper cd, some head gear (for taiming my unruly mass of curls), some money from various rellos (gotta love that pound to aussie dollar conversion rate), a tshirt and an ipod shuffle. Was pretty happy about the shuffle as it means I can finally listen to music on the hour long bus trip to uni. I've had various musical appliances over the years and all have been either broken or lost fairly quickly. Hopefully I'll be a bit more careful with the shuffle. I've decided he definitely needs a name, but I haven't thought of one appropriate yet.

We played the traditional christmas day backyard cricket match: Australia vs the rest of the world. My siblings and I are Aussies but our Dad is a pom and we were originally born in England so Spark and I played for the rest of the world along with Yogi (don't mention the war) and an English visitor, Billy. Spark batted with supreme confidence (I think he scored a half century) and Australia was smashed brutally. I got a couple of wickets (mainly by fluke!) but my batting was pretty abysmal garnering only 2 runs in 2 innings. Cricket is not my thing, but it's tradition.

After cricket we had a BBQ with prawns and octupi (sounds very cultish) steak and chicken. It was a pretty damn good lunch. There was salad too but I used all my matrix skills to avoid that shit.

After lunch we had a battle royal in the pool. Basically there were six or seven people in the pool, and one soccerball. It was flat which meant it could be grabbed and contorted easily but it was also full of water which made it heavy and unweildy. The aim was to get the soccerball, generally this meant wrestling it away from other people, and clobber the other players with it. It was a lot of fun. Mostly the soccerball was thrown at heads (the easiest target in the pool) and if you ducked to get away they just waited till you surfaced to nail you. Although this was often made difficult by the other players in the pool tackling you to get the pool. But sometimes instead of throwing the ball people would just punch other folk with the heavy ball. At one point Toe even punched someone in the nose with the ball causing his nose to piss blood into the pool. It was pretty brutal and a heckload of fun. Meanwhile the oldies were playing a more sedate version of the Christmas Day cricket match. Walking sticks and zimmer frames were in abundance, speed and agility were not.

People started cruising home after an hour or two of the battle royal and as things started to wind down I realised I was very tired and sunburnt. But it was still a good day. Some good friends stuck around for a while after for a chat and chill out which was nice.

I forgot how much I enjoy christmas day. I forgot battle royal. I forgot sunscreen.