Flat3D

Advent and Christmas

So it is advent and has been for almost 3 full weeks now which means Christmas is creeping closer with every moment I spend typing this.

This brings mixed feelings, I’m slightly down because I won’t get to spend it with my brother, mum and dad in NI for the first time in my life. But at the same time, Christmas in our house has changed a lot in the past four or 5 years. It’s not the unbridled funfest that it once was. Don’t get me wrong, it’s also nice that my understanding and appreciation of the season is no longer all about getting off school, eating turkey and greedily gurning that my brother has more/bigger/more exciting presents than I do (whether he does or not).

But the current Christmas season brings more pressures. I am to spend it with the Elliot family, this brings the nervous feeling of being an intruder into a seemingly finely honed yearly set of traditions. It also brings the concern and difficulty of how to buy, when to buy and what to buy as presents for everyone (there are going to be at least 10 other people there) But it also brings home the pleasure it is to spend this time of year with people and reminds me of all the people who are spending these holidays away from friends and family and don’t have such a group to attach to. International students (both here and in the UK), people who work abroad, people who just don’t have a family for whatever reasons; poverty, death, abandonment etc.

Another interesting thing this Christmas is that it brings with it a workload. Now I am used to being busy before Christmas as my school and university did me the nice favour of burdening the holiday with the stress of the subsequent examinations. But this year it is all based around Christmas itself. We have many, many events coming up beginning tonight and continuing until the 27th (I think). This leads to a lot of work to be done (not all by me I might add, suprisingly little by me in some cases…more due to inability than inactivity though, before Dad quotes his “lazy, good for nothing…” line)

And now you are probably reading this thinking how awfully depressed I am or something. I’m not really. I just have a pretty miserable cold today and everything always looks more depressing through the haze of freshly sneezed snot and germs.

And the pictures are slowly being fixed and re-resized to be put back online.