Don't hate Christmas!

In my office today the young receptionist was grumbling as she waded through the box of Christmas decorations. Eventually she exploded: "I hate Christmas!"

I went over to assist the unpacking of the tree, and talked about how, as a dedicated Church-goer and collector of Christmas decorations, I love Christmas.

I know what she means though. For many people Christmas is a rush from one end of year festive occasion, to another shopping trip, to another worry about how much this is all costing, to another panic over family expectations and so on.

Over the years I have tried to simplify our experience of Christmas and help us all enjoy it more. I want to share some of our practices with you.

1. Be upfront and let each other know what you want for Christmas
There is a funny sort of belief which is quite prevalent in our society, that if we really love each other we automatically know what the other would want for Christmas, and where we could get it, so that they can be surprised on the day with the perfect present. We feel as though this is totally unrealistic. People who love each other are quite often unaware of what the other wants. I believe that we need to be willing to help our loved ones out by giving a hint or two or a whole list of suggestions, so that they don't waste their money and time getting something which will not be appreciated.

In our house we give each other quite extensive lists of things -some quite expensive (in our standards) and some things quite inexpensive. We all choose something to purchase from the list of things we know our loved ones want. Often we add a small 'joke' present as well, but nothing elaborate.

This one practice takes a huge amount of stress out of the gift-giving.

2. Keep away from the shops

I mostly buy things on the internet. I love this way of purchasing because it is so convenient and I am not tempted to buy more things than I want, or to purchase coffee and cake to reward myself for venturing in overcrowded shops in the heat of summer.

This year my work party has suggested that our 'secret santa' gift to each other should cost less than $10 and come from an Op Shop. Easy!

3. Make up some family events or decorations

Putting meaning in Christmas is a matter of doing things which bring joy, rather than purchasing things. It can be anything from decorating the tree together to going to a
Carols by Candlelight' service on the school oval. Lots of families walk around the neighbourhood and look at the houses which have put up special lights displays.

I love to add a personal touch with the things I make to decorate the house. Each year the collection grows and I feel like I have found an old friend when I unpack these things each year. I made the tree quilt a few years ago now, and am currently working on a quilted Advent calendar.

4. Keep it simple

Years ago we made a budget for Christmas and it has hardly changed since. Our view was that this was a Christmas gift, not a birthday present. It would have a specified dollar value and that was how it would be.

Similarly we like to enjoy nice foods at Christmas, and in the past I often felt stressed about it. Now my family talks over the menu and encourages me to keep the plans tasty but easy. A stressed mother makes for a stressed day. A relaxed mother makes for a happy day.

We have a special breakfast -and this enables us to feel festive all day -and a light but tasty lunch (often served cold in Perth's hot weather) and we linger over it.

Dinner is often just lunch's leftovers.

As we often give each other DVDs at Christmas, there is usually some kind of new blockbuster to watch together and relax.

Our extended family meets up for a special celebration on Boxing Day. We all bring a contribution to the meal. At first some people were unsure about it not being on Christmas day, but now we realise how much less stressed and tired the children are if they can spread the family obligations over the two days, and we all can be much more relaxed and at ease.


5. Remember where it started

Christmas belonged to Jesus long before the stores took it over and turned it into a festival to greed. Sing a few Christmas carols, listen to Handel's "Messiah", read Charles Dicken's "A Christmas Carol", maybe even venture into a local Church. You need the context of the celebration to make it meaningful.

I wish you all a peaceful start to the Christmas time.

Its fun to get ready!

It is Advent and that means getting ready for Christmas. Not the kind of 'getting ready' that the shops ask us to do -spending, spending and more spending then complaining that 'it doesn't feel like Christmas"!

In our house we have some traditions which make Christmas a lovely time for us without a lot of expense.

Over the years I have collected a lot of Christmas decorations. Some were made over the years by my children. A lot I found in op shops (see the little mice below -which goes with my little china cat to remind me of the Cat and Mouse Carol) . Some I bought from my favourite Christmas shop in the Blue Mountains.

Each year on the first Sunday of Advent the boxes of Christmas decorations come down from the roof. The CD player has our favourite Christmas music on it.

Everyone has to be here to help!

All the decorative items that help make my 'country decorating' real have to be taken down and put away and all the shelves dusted. Books are pushed to the back of shelves to make way for decorative items in as many places as possible.
Some pictures are put away so that Christmas specific decorations can take over.

Then we decorate every space we can.

This year I have given my children the task of trying to count how many 'nativities" I have in the loungeroom. It is more than 5 and less than 15!

I now have a tree in the kitchen, a tree in the loungeroom, several small trees in the dining room and a tree in the family room.

It has become a lovely start to our Christmastide.

This year I have added my Christmas Quilt to the back of the sofa -I am very proud to have made this in my sewing class. And soon I hope to add my newest quilt -an Advent quilt -but first I have to finish it.

I am amazed how many people don't bother to decorate for Christmas. It brings out the child in me and that can't be a bad thing surely!

The final picture is of my DH who was so inspired that he actually sat down at the piano and played some Christmas carols!

I plan to write more about putting the meaning back into Christmas in simple ways next time, with more pictures of my decorating efforts.

My wish for you is for a simple meaningful run up to Christmas.

Travel Options

Since I changed jobs I have had more time on the public transport system in Perth. It is a pretty good system really, the trains are on time most of the time and the rolling stock is new.

I get the 8.10 from Warwick and get off 15 minutes later in Leederville. Off along the walkways and bicycle tracks and I can be in my office in West Perth by 8.40. It is a pleasant walk -this morning I rejoiced in the views of the blue Jacaranda trees in Leederville.

I park the car at Warwick for $2 and the train fare is roughly $3 each way. $8 per day ($40 per week) is not a bad price.

I also get a car park about once per week at our office in West Perth -and then I leave home at 8.10 and I can usually be parked by 8.30 am. The car is comfortable and I arrive at work refreshed -but I have had no exercise! Having the car at work is good if I need to travel to a meeting that is hard to get to by public transport or too far away to take a taxi. If I need to carry anything heavy it is good too.

The car travel used to cost me somewhere between $40 and $50 per week, depending on the cost of petrol, so the saving using public transport is not huge. However there are lots of hidden costs with the car -insurance and registration and maintenance and depreciation and so on. Then there is the cost of the road system and the cost to the earth of all of that carbon being vented into the atmosphere.

I was reading recently that some experts believe that we have already found all the commercially viable deposits of oil and that production is already in decline. In time this will mean that price of petrol will have to keep on going up -and at some time the public transport option will begin to make more obvious economic sense to the average person.

I know many people who do not know how to catch public transport -they don't know how to buy a ticket or read a timetable. They drive their cars day in day out. If we are to live more sustainably on the earth, we are going to have to deal with our transport choices.

How do you get around?

Effort pays off

This week we have been working on the garden in every spare moment, even foregoing our usual early morning walk to get things done.

We both work full time, and have had full social lives on the weekends, but this garden needs our care just now.

The summer is warming up and the biggest task was to spread some wonderful lupin mulch on the veggie beds in the back yard, to shade the soil and protect the moisture within. Lupin mulch feeds the soil by adding nitrogen to the soil. I used it last year on the veggies -and the added bonus is that it smells wonderful!

Last weekend DH worked very hard getting all the back yard covered with in-line drip irrigation. It was a huge job, but it will save a lot of water and put it to better use.

There is still a lot more I would like to have done, but it is so rewarding to see the Seven Year beans climbing the trellis we have made on the fence, and the passionfruit with a lovely crop of green egg shaped fruits.

The tomatoes in
the wicking bed are looking seriously healthy at the moment. We water this only once per week via a tube that puts the water underneath the plants in a reservoir of sorts, and the shade cloth just breaks the heat of the sun.

I wish I had planted more cucumbers -we have only four, but if I look after them that will be a good crop.

It is not all productive in the garden however. I am just as pleased that the jasmine that I planted in a desperate attempt to cover up our ugly fence near the back entertaining area, is now in flower and smells wonderful.

I am even happy that the cannas I had given up on and tried to pull out have defied every attempt at eradication and are now in glorious flower.

It is interesting to see how much food we can get out of our small garden, given the fact that we don't have a lot of space, and the work we do in the garden tends to be a bit sporadic.

We are harvesting huge rainbow chard and tiny lettuce leaves at the moment, along with a large variety of herbs which add a lot of flavour to our food.
The added benefit of course is that the food we produce is entirely organic and totally fresh when we eat it, so we are getting the very best nutrition we can get from these things.

Apart from the exercise required to make it happen of course! However nothing really happens without effort and in the case of the garden the effort seems to be paying off at the moment.

Learn a new skill

Those who are on the journey of simplicity often find themselves challenged to do for themselves what they would have had others do for them in the past.

The idea is that we need to revalue the old fashioned skills that our generation nearly lost.
W e need to find out how to

• cook from scratch,
• mend things when they are broken
• make do with what we have got
• be resourceful
  

The idea is that we become more self-reliant, and more able to value the sense of achievement more than the quick lift of having purchased something.


Take this Advent calendar for example. I struggled all day Saturday with those pesky stars. My poor brain could not make them work! It would have been much easier to go out and buy something instead, but where would the sense of achievement been?

As it is I have learned a new skill.

This craft will, I hope, lead me into many enjoyable hours of my future life.

I have already used it to make a whole cloth baby quilt for my neice's child. I had just learned how to use the darning foot on the sewing machine to do free-motion quilting, and it was very satisfying to see the result that this new technique was able to achieve.

This year I have also been setting myself up to grow my veggies from seed -something I have had only limited success in doing in the past.

I am still learning how to manage the veggie garden so that there is a more manageable supply of veggies. At the moment we have huge quantities of rainbow chard, but soon we will be over-run with tomatoes (I hope!).

The thing about growing from seed is learning to stage the plantings over a period of weeks so that there are some veggies in season, some coming on and some going to seed to save for the next time.

All these new skills give me plenty of challenges. I find them far more satisfying than going shopping! And when you don't go shopping, you have time to learn all these new things!

Finally a word of welcome to the new subscribers to my little blog. It is tremendously encouraging to have you here! Please feel free to leave a comment any time.

New beginnings-from old things.

This rose was on it's last legs last year. We moved it, fed it, mulched it, watered it and leaned the spade up against it. One last chance!!!

Look what happened!

I have an aubergine which was planted late last summer. Didn't produce anything. I decided to see what would happen if I left it over winter, as I had tried on several occasions to grow these without success.

Now I have lots of tiny aubergines!

These are the first flowers on my passionfruit vine.

I have also just started my new job. No pictures of that, but another new beginning.

And I went to a new patchwork class and this is what I have made so far.


I love new beginnings -the hopeful promise of them.

Yet everything here had preparatory work to get this far.

Everything new is in some way dependent upon what went before: tending the garden, designing the quilt, learning the skills, putting in the applications.

Today is All Saints Day and this is a time to remember all those who went before -who did the preparatory work, to give us the start we have had today.

Spring garden shade

Our garden is beginning to adapt to warmer weather at last.

DH did a fantastic job when I was away in Sydney last week, and put up all the shade sails and shadecloth blinds on the north and west of the house. These blinds stay up all summer. They bring lots of light into the rooms -somehow the light seems to bounce around the room, yet they cut out most of the heat that otherwise would make the rooms very hot.

Eventually we will have a grape covered pergola on this northern side, but that will need to be of sturdy construction and DH needs to be on holiday to tackle it -not a weekend job.

There are still lots of spring flowers -pelargoniums are splendid at the moment, as are the daisies and cannas.

The kitchen garden is producing leafy things at the moment. Today we harvested the last of the red cabbages.

We have some lovely lettuce, but I will need to get some more in soon.

There are some great rainbow chard plants in the larger raised garden bed. I am going to put more lettuces in here under the shadecloth sail (picture lower down).

The heirloom tomatoes survived the transplanting process and are now in the smaller of our raised garden bed -the first of the 'wicking' beds. We have them under shade on the northern side. They seem to be very happy in the bed, and the soil seems cools and damp but not wet.

Today is going to be 32 degrees Celcius, according to the forecast. Sunday is one of our twice weekly watering days, and our automatic drip irrigation has been on. The plants gradually adapt to the warmer, drier regime of our Mediterranean type climate, and will adjust.

I am very happy that two of my three roses are in flower. I have struggled to get the feeding and sunlight regime right for these, but what I am doing now seems to be working.

Roses are good in this setting -they keep on flowering through summer when other flowers have finished. I like having some flowers to pick for the house, and of course the flowers are essential to bring the bees. Last summer we were hand pollenating some veggies, so I am trying harder to make sure that there are some flowers among the vegetables out the back .

The next tasks will be to continue the heavy mulching of the garden that we have started, to protect the plants and conserve the water in the soil. We will be doing this for weeks to come.

Soon it will be common for us to take every meal we can outdoors, in the patio out the back, and the menu will be cold collations, salads and sandwiches as staples.

It is something I am very grateful for every day, to live in such a fantastic place and with such a wonderful climate. We had a good wet winter this year, the first for many years, and the street trees are looking strong again and ready to cope with the summer heat.