christmas new zealand style

right, so christmas is celebrated a bit different than back home you could say. Lets take a look at the differences, shall we?

1. lack of snow. At home its not unusual to have a blistering cold, complete dark and snowy christmas. Where as here its sunny, blistering warm (yes, you can actually get blisters from the sun down here) and a very big lack of snow!

2. the barbecue feast. NZ style christmas food is a real good barbecue with the whole shabang. About 4 different types of meat and 40 different types of salad and everything that follows. Real good, i'd say.

3. Everyones invited. Unlike the norwegian christmas where its family-central, the NZ style christmas is open for everyone. Its very normal for friends to celebrate christmas together, where the slogan usually is: "the more the merrier".

So now that you know the differences, i'll tell you about my christmas.

the 24th here is a big party day, since christmas is celebrated the 25th. So after work we got dressed up to go to a C-party, which is a costume party where you could dress up as anything as long as it started with the letter C. I got dressed up in my Superman costume that I bought for Halloween, size 6-8 years old, going as a cartoon character. There were a lot of people dressed up as cowgirls and cowboys, a girl dressed up as a chicken with another girl dressed up as a chickencoop (you have to remember this is farm-ville), and most others dressed up as the odd caveman and to our surprise one guy dressed up commando (naked). It was a really fun party, we spent most of the night dancing our little booties off.
On the 25th i woke up in my little hut, put on some christmas music and opened my one present from grandma and grandpa sitting inside almost sweating because it was pretty hot outside. Not exactly a christmas feel you could say. After a while of laying out on the green grass playing with the mental dog molly, we drove in to town to go to a barbecue over at some friends house. It was incredibly hot and the sun was shining so strong (as it usually does here). We started the barbecue off with a nice ice cold glass of champagne with home grown strawberries in (everything here is homegrown, even the pig!). Yum yum. Then we had some cheese and crackers, before going on to the main meal: a roasted pig. (note martine: the pig was raised on a small farm and owned by the parents of who we were visiting, it had a very good life and was not aware of its plans to become our christmasdinner before it was killed, in a very human way i must add). We had about three different salads, three different potato and rice salads and so much good stuff to go with. It was very yummy to say the least!
After the meal we spent the rest of the day and night playing darts, hackysack and just sitting around in the sun talking listening to good music until the day turned to night. When night arrived we ate the desert which was a fruit-salad with homegrown strawberries and raspberries and pavlova. YUUUMMY! pavlova is a traditional kiwi desert, and is a cake made of sugar pretty much. Very good, but as you could guess, very sweet! There is usually cream and fruit as an icing, and its delicious, but i can only handle one piece before i feel like puking. Which is good, because then you dont have so many, so in other words the traditional kiwi desert is not only very good, but very cheap!
That was pretty much how we ended our night and christmas celebration. On the 26th it was back to work again at 7.30 am so that all the people that had barely had their christmas presents a whole day could get a coffee and a muffin before going to the city to exchange them again. Lovely!

Well guys thats my new zealand style christmas for you!
stay tuned!