Christmas And Boxing Day

I love looking at other people's blogs around Christmas time. It's interesting to read about the way people celebrate the holiday season all over the world. (It's also inspiring ~ after reading Northern American blogs I've taken to Christmas baking.) Carola, has written a lovely post about Swedish traditions.

Christmas celebrations are always a team effort for my family. My mother readies the house for overnight guests, we all cook and my baby sister puts up the decorations. Last year we ate Christmas dinner under the stars, with lots of twinkling lights:

This year, my sister decorated with Chinese lanterns:

I made a pavlova, the national dessert of Australia and New Zealand ~ my first:

As you can see, I topped it with strawberries, milk chocolate and passionfruit. It was (she says immodestly) delicious. Nigella has a similar recipe to the one I used (if you take out the chocolate in the meringue) here.

We celebrated Christmas in the evening because it was so hot, scorchingly so ~ Christmas Day was 40.1 degrees celcius. The following day was even hotter, a sizzling 44.2 degrees celcius ~ Perth was the hottest city on the planet on Boxing Day. I stayed inside, underneath the ceiling fans, eating left~overs (Dad's roast chicken, beef and potatoes with red~wine gravy, my sister's pumpkin and pine nut salad, lots and lots of chocolate...mmmmmmmm), watching old movies and , finally, finding the time for some more crocheting (hooray!). I made a Pink Shells dishcloth out of some gorgeous Peaches n Creme cotton that I bought from The Wool Shack.

Christmas was a simple but lovely time for me.
I'm not planning on taking down the decorations any time soon, I'd like to savour the season's memories instead.
I hope that you also had a wonderful holiday, wherever in the world you were.