Merry Christmas

May God's perfect gift, Jesus Christ, bring you peace and hope throughout the New Year. (If you're reading this, Anita, I hope you don't mind me quoting you here - it's just that it summed things up perfectly.)

So, Christmas in Nuzziland, eh? It's warm but there's not so much of the sun to be seen. I was fed a lie ;)

This morning Joanne, Shirley and I went down to the little church in Leigh with Leon, Nigel, Claire and Cleo and Georgie. Tom and Jennifer stayed at home. It was nice to be able to go down for the Christmas morning service together. The church was full though. Standing room only for the late-comers. It was good to be reminded on the real meaning behind Christmas, and why we really celebrate it. It's a great time for families to get together and all that peace and love at Christmas stuff is good, but there is more to it than that. Much more. Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of that (he says moving right on to talk about his presents...)

After church we came back and opened our pressies together. I got a nice shiny new camera from Joanne. I'm really rather excited about getting to take lots of photos of the New Zealand landscape now. She also bought me some Acqua di Gio aftershave. Shirley and Tom had one of my photos printed on a canvas for us, a long panorama shot of the Thames that we took on our day up Tower Bridge. That'll look great near the dining table at home. Jennifer got me an awesome recipe book that mixes NZ recipes with beautiful landscape photos while Leon got me a very useful electrified fly-swat. Given the number of mosquitos that were feasting on my sweet English blood last night I could have done with it a day early. My sister got us two ticket-vouchers for a theatre in Christchurch - I really want to see Under Milkwood seeing that we studied it at GCSE, while we didn't have space for the present from my mum and James in our suitcase so we'll have something to open when we get home.

Right, it's nearly 1pm now so I had better head up to see how lunch is doing. Yum!