A Very Merry Australian, Orphan Christmas!

Christmas can be one of the most difficult times to be away from home. 2007 is the second Christmas of 26 that I have spent away from my family. Luckily, there always seem to be others in the same boat as me, and it really can be a great time to get together and celebrate!

This year, we entititled our event an Orphan's Christmas, not because we didn't have families, but we just wouldn't be able to be with them this Christmas. We decided to have the event at our house in SYdney, in our main living area.

Now, I live in a house of mostly guys and none of us really have much of a handle on organizing the food aspect of a holiday dinner. I don't even want to begin describing to you the scene on Christmas eve when we decided it was finally time to go shopping for some food and figure out what we were going to eat. We ended up at a very, very busy shopping centre downtown Sydney walking in circles pretty much disagreeing on anything and everything and really getting nowhere. Chicken, turkey, pork?!? Too many options.

Suddently, Rowan and I were walking past the meat section and it was the first of many Holiday Miracles as we called them. Sitting all alone on the shelf, with a sliver of light shining in it - pre-seasoned, pre-stuffed - The Holiday Roast (as it was called on the label). There was only one left, it was a fair sized chicken that we picked up with achunk of ham and went on our way.

Brett cooked up the roast the next day and it really was amazing! Tender, juicy, great stuffing and superb gravy. It really was a holiday Miracle.

The day was a huge success and we had a great group of orphans who showed up:

Mark - Australian
Brett - Australian
Rowan - Australian
Teresa - Australian
Alok - Canadian
AMit - Indian
Nomi - Japanese
Leah - Japanese
Mel - The random australian neighbour
Me - Canadian

After our fantastic meal, we had a fun little gift exchange - which mostly contained random nerf-type toys and funny moustaches. It was a beautiful sunny day so we high tailed it down to the park on the corner and spent a few hours running off our big meal! Tons of fun again.

After it got dark, we returned home to enjoy Mark's Trifle in a box as we sat on the roof admiring the Sydney skyline and just chilling out.

We finished off the night with a 4 hour game of Risk. What Christmas is complete without a game of Risk? Went to bed at about 4am, ready to get up in a few hours to begin the long 1000km trek to Brisbane!

Merry Christmas!!!!