Christmas 2009

I meant to write about my Christmas here a while ago so here it goes. It was my first Christmas here in New Zealand with Andrew. We got a fake Christmas tree and set it up in the corner of our livingroom. Kuma very much enjoyed knocking the bells off of it and diving into the corner when he was playing. He only knocked it over once so we can say that it fared well.


Anyways, since Andrew and I are virtually orphans here, in NZ (i.e. no family), we spent Christmas morning on our own. I was Santa and filled the stockings (yes I actually woke up in the middle of the night and filled them) and left them hanging from our drawers. When we woke up we opened our stockings (I already knew what was in mine since I filled it). I got a knitting kit and some treats.

Andrew was excited to find a GI Joe character in his, a few small water pistols and lots of candy (which he is still finishing)!

He was surprised that I got him a "baddie" (as they say in this part of the world). Well, what can you do when the choices are limited at the toy store? I told me that next time I would get him a good guy.

After we opened our stockings we went and gave Kuma his stocking...I mean what kind of animals owners would we be if we didn't get Kuma any treats right? We got him some new toys and some treats called Jer Highs which he went nuts over! I think that the Jer Highs had catnip in them because he practically bit our fingers off when we gave them to him. They also had a beef jerky type of texture so he really had to work the jaw muscles to eat them.


Since we don't have kids yet we decided to get pics with Kuma. He was somewhat compliant.

Andrew got the G.I. Joe DVD for Christmas. He gave me some silver hoop earrings.

After we opened our gifts Andy made some cheese and tomato and ham croissants (I decided to forgo the ham) and I cut up some fruit. Here is what our brunch looked like.

It was delicious! Both of us ate way too much and then had a bit of a dilemma because by the time we finished eating it was around noon and we had been invited to our bishop's house for a brunch with their family which started at one. We did go and forced ourselves to eat something since it would have been rude if we didn't but felt kind of full and sick for the rest of the day. Neither of us felt like cooking Christmas dinner. Our friend Ronald from church (he is a YSA who is living here - orginially from Chile) was invited over for dinner and we weren't sure if he was still coming because we hadn't heard from him but he did end up coming. We felt kind of bad because we didn't have any dinner ready but we offered to make something for him. He stayed for a bit and then went to someone else's place for dinner. This was a relief! After he left we went to bed and this was our Christmas. Quiet but nice. I still miss Christmas in Canada though. Oh yeah, someone did the twelve days of Christmas for us and this is what they left on one of the days! It was made out of chicken wire, white material, buttons and a real carrot for a nose.

And this was Christmas 2009 for us.