Christmas Day with the Harveys

Our wonderful neighbors, despite have a total of 15 siblings, happened to be celebrating Christmas at home by themselves this year. So they adopted us, and - although the original plan was just to go over for a light lunch - we pretty much spent the whole day there - it was great! It was a beautiful sunny day, but not too hot, so we hung out on their back porch and ate and laughed - just what you should be doing on Christmas.

We started with a big pancake breakfast at 11:00 - they made pancakes, we made pancakes - there were pancakes everywhere! We brought some fruit confits made from native Australian fruits, of which they had never heard. We also brought some "brandy custard," which we discovered next to the egg nog and decided we should try (it tastes pretty much like vanilla pudding, in my opinion). After Round 1 of stuffing our faces, we took a break for naps/walks/etc.

Then Round 2 began at 5:00. They had prawns and oysters for appetizers, and we brought 2 bottles of wine that we got on our trip, so we had a little wine tasting.

Playing in the club house between stuffing our faces

Ann decided we'd be her guinea pigs for dinner, so she made snapper 3 different ways: thai-style, panfried with mango chutney, and lettuce-wrapped on the grill. They all tasted wonderful - we couldn't decide what our favourite was. Rob said his brother declared him a "lousy poof" for having a fancy, Sydney-style seafood dinner rather than the traditional meat and potatoes. But we enjoyed it! And Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without Christmas crackers - these wonderful 'exploding' tubes filled with a plastic toy, a paper crown, and a joke.



There was also an enthusiastic family sing-along when Slim Dusty's music started playing - Ben and I even knew one of the songs! In this pic, the song is about a mighty footy (rugby) player, so they're all flexing their muscles accordingly. Eliza, being her father's daughter, was certainly the most enthusiastic about this footy star.

We ended the night with some of Ann's terrific homemade pavlova and a game of Scrabble. However, with 3 math/engineering brains and 1 tired brain, there weren't that many impressive words on the board - we thought we were doing good when we got 4 letter words, and eventually started allowing 2 letter words and letter-swapping.