Day of boxes

The banoffi pie.

Today is Boxing Day, a day important to New Zealanders for one of two things: The sales that all the big—and most small—retailers have beginning today. It’s also a day on which many people travel, either heading out for a holiday somewhere, or heading home after having had Christmas elsewhere. That was us.

This year we went to Nigel’s brother’s house near Hamilton for Christmas Day. We got there about lunchtime and other family members arrived over the course of the afternoon. It was a nice day.

I don’t know that there’s such a thing as a “typical” Christmas dinner in New Zealand, but they tend to fall into two broad categories: A roast dinner or a BBQ dinner, and each of them have variations.

Roast dinners might be ham or turkey or chicken or—it varies. So do the side dishes. But we don’t do roast dinners on Christmas—it’s too hot!—so I can only go by what other people tell me they do.

We always have a BBQ Christmas dinner, which this year included chip and dip, cheese and crackers, and prawns for starters. The main course included steak, sausages, lamb chops, chicken kebabs, cold ham and lots of salads. We had an equally big spread for dessert, featuring the traditional Kiwi classic, a pavlova, of course, but also a banoffi pie (pictured above because it was closest to me—no, really!), which isn’t necessarily “traditional”, but it was nice. So was the fresh fruit salad. Others probably different things—like I said, there’s a lot of variation.

Jake's snooze interrupted.

As always, our dogs were very well behaved. There were five dogs, all up, and ours were the mid-sized version. All the dogs got along just fine. When Jake decided he’d had enough of people, he’d go off and hop in the camper and have a snooze. Sunny, on the other hand, was right in the middle of things.

Sunny at play.

There were also some nine kids there, ranging in age from infant right up to teenager, including our grand nieces and nephews. The kids seemed to have have fun, too.

We went to bed surprisingly early—around 10:30pm, I think—which meant an early start to today. Leftovers were heated up on the BBQ for breakfast, and then we left for home late morning.

Both the trip down on Christmas Day and the trip home today were uneventful—good traffic flows, but never particularly heavy. The dogs slept most of each trip, so were no trouble at all.

Once home, we had some lunch, unpacked the car, and then settled in to a nice quiet day at home, mainly just playing around. It IS a public holiday, after all.

Bella washing.

Bella was clearly pleased to see us back home. She hung around us, and purred the moment we started patting her. I took a photo of her having a wash this afternoon. It’s blurry, but I wanted her to have some equal time with the dogs.

And that was our Christmas holiday for this year.

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