The Christmas festivities are survived and now the preparation for New Year celebrations are starting. For this Christmas we had for the first time a Christmas tree. All the previous years we had either no space in our tiny apartment in Finland or like last year just no time and decoration as we just had moved in the new place. However once Christmas was over last year we went straight to the next decoration store and bought tons of stuff for our future Christmas tree with a 50% discount (yay for intelligent shopping).
So what did we do this Christmas? First of all we got the last decorations done for our tree and placed all of the Christmas presents under it. Both of us had never done it before so it was a rather nice feeling once it was all done and Nathan saw the whole thing for the first time. For lunch we had nothing special, as we visited in the late afternoon an old lady to eat some food there together with my parents. The whole day was very uneventful, just a nice peaceful day with much sunshine. As the entire week was just rainy and dark we decided to start the day with some nice breakfast at my parents place and go after that together with Nathan to the nearby playground so he could burn some energy for the day. After that we visited this old lady I mentioned before. She is a friend of my mother from back in time when my mother first arrived in Germany to work here in the 1960s. My mother also lived at her place for several years and ever since I can remember Christmas we went to her place to have a simple dish “Potato Salad with Wiener Sausages”. Doesn’t sound like a fancy Christmas dinner does it? Well it is simple and pretty much tradition in my family to eat this every single Christmas. Usually we have some more German traditional food the following days such as turkey with red cabbage, potatoes and savory dark sauce but on Christmas itself we always keep it very simple.
After we arrived back home the exciting part came when it was time to exchange the Christmas presents. I won’t go too much into detail but Nathan got some Lego Duplo with which he is playing non-stop currently and I got from my wife a quadcopter which I successfully crash-landed already. I think my wife got a pretty awesome gift for me as she can just cart me to the nearby park with the quadcopter and I can just sit there and let this monstrosity fly around/ crash around plus scare other people. As you can see our Christmas has been very uneventful but something like this is nice as it allows you to relax a bit and enjoy the whole day more. For my wife the most exciting part besides receiving her gift was to decorate the Christmas tree. At this point I have to thank the old man to help getting this tree into our apartment as I wouldn’t have been able to do so on my own. For next year I need to remember to buy only what I also can carry!
How was your Christmas?
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It looks like everyone had fun! Good luck for the coming new year! 🙂
Thank you so much. We had much fun this Christmas 🙂
The Christmas tree looks great! We ran out of trees this year in town, but my friends who we had Christmas dinner with managed to get one through contacts ! So nice, it’s not quite the same at Christmas time without a tree 🙂
Yeah and here we actually got too many trees. Nearby our home they still got dozens of trees left :p
Love the tree. I put one up every year, but usually we are traveling at Christmas. So I get it in early December and enjoy it the entire month. I know my German ancestors would have a fit, but they can lump it. If I’m responsible for killing a noble fir, I’m getting all the enjoyment possible out of it before the city collects it and makes it mulch.
What? No shots of your new drone?
Oh yes, here in Germany they can be strict with trees. My mother was shocked that we set up the tree a day before Christmas instead of the big day itself!
I’ve got no good pictures of the drone yet, only a bad one from my phone 😉
Looks like a ton of fun still 🙂 As for us, well, we are flat broke due to our birthdays and decided to just get each other something small. Derek got me a charm for my Thomas Sabo bracelet and I got him new office socks, shaving cream, a Polo t-shirt and some chocolate. lol. As for Christmas, we had a BBQ at his place for lunch… I only got to eat a piece of corn since that was the only vegetarian thing. We came over to my place for dinner and had some potatoes, spinach pie and some meat (well, he did lol). The following day,we went to some family friends for dinner and ate some pasta, gammon, chicken, salad, panetone and ice cream. Good thing is, I don’t eat much 😛 LOL
Merry Belated Christmas 🙂
Sounds still great even though you were broke :p
It can be hard to be a vegetarian sometimes, doesnt it? 🙂
We have some of my friends coming over in a few days and they are vegeterians, my wife got zero idea what to make for them as in Chinese food even so-called vegeterian dishes usually have some meat hidden in it 😀
I think your christmas sounds lovely (not uneventful at all). You all enjoyed yourselves and that is the most important thing. I had italian food with friends at their home (so definitely not the traditional turkey dinner with vegetables or the Aussie version of prawns and salad) and I really enjoyed that. Thanks so much for sharing yours.
It is interesting how different the food is around the world when celebrating Christmas. Sure it differs already in general all around the world but Christmas which is usually associated as a festivity which is more or less being celebrated the same (at least for Christians in this matter) has in each country their own special dishes.
I’m glad you finally got to decorate for Christmas! I know a lot of people have very big Christmas events with many people and lots of recipes, but sometimes simplicity can make Christmas special too! It’s very interesting to hear your Christmas traditions ^^
I never really celebrated Christmas any different except when I lived in Finland where I didn’t celebrated at all…
To think about it I don’t even know whether I would love some more eventful Christmas 🙂
Happy holidays! Sounds like you had a very relaxing and peaceful Christmas day. Best wishes for 2016! 😀
All the best also for you. Let’s see how our new year celebration will be,only think I know it will again only with family which is already more than enough 😉
I think an ‘uneventful” Christmas is the best kind. 🙂 Your Christmas tree looks lovely- I bet it was fun for Nathan to see and lovely for you all to do it together for the first time. Your present also sounds like a lot of fun!
I guess that these kind of celebrations are the best for Christmas as I can’t even imagine how it would be in any other way. Especially my wife is pretty proud about the tree though she mentioned already that we need to buy more decoration this week for next year…
Nathan was very very excited during the whole day and it took several days to get him back into is old daily routine 🙂
Glad your Christmas was nice and relaxing! Mine was… not, haha. I spent Christmas day working in the morning and then in the afternoon packing all the things in the office… and I cannot even remember what I ate xD
That’s nothing for me though I know how it is to work till late on Christmas from my previous jobs. Some Christmas you will have perhaps again some “holiday” and get to relax a bit
Nice to hear you had a relaxing Christmas, Crazy. Nathan looks like he had a good time. And I hope he will enjoy the presents for a long time to come. For me, didn’t do too much for Christmas. Spent the whole day at home, and then went out to a Chinese dinner with my parents. We had a lot of delicious Chinese food that didn’t taste salty. One of the dish was black pepper chicken 😀
Well even without any real Christmassy stuff to do you could still relax (I hope!) and eat food you enjoyed 🙂
We spent all the Christmas days with my parents doing nearly nothing at all
I just finished a small piece bakery bought stollen. My partner has always bought stollen from a high end bakery. Vancouver DOES have a gourmet bakery run by a chef born and trained in southern Germany. He is married and now lives for past decades with his Asian wife.
https://www.thomashaas.com/
He bakes pastries with more delicate complexity and lovely finishes compared to other high end bakeries we’ve tried.
We usually have a 4-5 home dinner on Christmas Eve.
Glad you did a tree for Nathan and selves. Hope you keep that up. I didn’t put up my mini tree because it is hidden a difficult to reach corner of Closet.
Happy New Year!
Interesting to hear about Thomas Haas. Perhaps I should try it out if I ever manage it to Vancouver.
My mother is doing each year her own stollen, only once we had different ones after I had won several Original Dresdner Stollen at a swimming competition ten years ago.
So far my parents also always had a tree, granted it is smaller than ours but even after I moved out they kept the tradition
Athens was quiet on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. A lot of the locals had left for the villages. Apart for some coffee shops, restaurants and some souvenir shops, the rest were shut.
On Boxing Day, a shop selling dried fruit, nuts, chocolates, sweets , Greek Christmas specialities, a chocolatier and some corner shops were opened. To my delight, I was able to get a few presents.
On Christmas Day, I walked past the main tourists sites. Dinner was beef cooked in a rich pepper sauce; the meat melted in the mouth.
I went on a two hours guided walk on Boxing Day. Someone went on a free guided walk the previous week but the guide never turned up. Lunch was roast pork with a few pieces of cracking (I polished off the crackling. Usually, I avoided the crackling but I cannot get pork products in Turkey (from my experience in the Gulf, it is possible to source alcohol (the real stuff) etc if you have the contact but I don’t drink nor lead a rock and roll life). Dinner was pork meat balls in a rich pepper sauce; this was the best Western meat ball.
It will be sometime before I eat another pork dish.
Athens was expansive for me. They told me it’s a bit cheaper now due to the crisis. Another resident stated that seven years ago, Athens was cheap.
Happy New Year, Timo. Hope 2016 brings abundance and success to all.
Sounds like you had a good time there. I dont know about the prices in Athens however last year we were on Rhodes and compared to Finland everything was so insanely cheap there even though it was at the main tourist locations! The crises as hit Greece hard and lets hope it will recover soon again 🙂
Here we did basically nothing the Christmas days besides eating half day and resting the other half
Is Rhodes worth visiting? What about the food? I always avoid tourist menu.
I was surprised to see so many graffitis in the centre of Athens, even on expansive properties. There are grand houses by the Acropolis but the windows are shut 24/7. That would do my head in.
Now that I’m on Turkish soil, it’s so odd to see my Turkish colleagues
putting up home made but lovely Christmas decorations, Christmas trees, Santa etc on the ceilings and in the corridor. Yes, the place is decked with them, more so than Athens.
p/s I had only eaten Dresden stollen once; it was the best ever. It was a gift of assorted East German Christmas specialities that I received years ago. I cannot source it in London.
Can’t really explain the food from Rhodes except there is tons of seafood…
Dresdner Stollen is something special and here in Germany only the ones bought from Dresden are the real deal. Sure there are the ones in the supermarket with the same name but they just don’t taste that good 🙂
Your tree looks beautiful and Nathan is a doll. So cute and so big! Looks like Santa was good to him!
Nathan is a little puppet :p
Santa was good enough for him, actually so good that he only gets one new gift at a time so he can handle all the Lego duplo 🙂
Sounds like a simple, family Christmas! Nathan looks so cute with his winter outfit 🙂
The weather was the same here last week. Sunny and plus 10 temperatures so it was hard to believe that it was December. At that point, I had started missing Kokkola and its snowy environment and the little houses with decorations and lights hanging on the windows and back/frontyard..
Your wife got you a nice gift, I was thinking of the same for my boyfriend, but I bought him (and me) tickets to Athens instead 🙂
I bet he will love Athens even more 😉
My brother got from his girlfriend also a helicopter, perhaps I can have some flying battle with him!
In Finland is also no snow right now except of Lappland, pretty sad
Lazy holidays are my favorites. This year hubby had four days off and it felt like a month! Our little one also got duplo lego from Santa, a train, and has been playing with nonstop!
Our one will get my old duplo train around summer time. I still got tons of duplo in the cellar…
Wow! I’d love to see a picture of your stash. I’d heard lego was a really important toy for kids but I had no idea until watching our little one play for hours and hours and hours with the same little blocks. Endless fun!
I really loved Lego and last Christmas I got some Lego Star Wars from my wife…
Really?! Lego Star Wars… now I would love to see a picture of that.
Lego Star Wars is really famous. Some sets which cost at first roughly 300 euros are few years later several thousand worth!
Ohhhhh…. now I see the plan. ;P
Sounds lovely and simple is good, very smart. Happy New Year CCF 🙂 Hope it’s filled with laughter, light and love. xxoo
Happy New Year for you as well. Preparations for our little new years celebration started already 🙂
We had a real tree this year which has been lovely, having a lovely New Year’s in Cromer, with the family all the best for 2016.
Real trees are really nice. We were lucky with this one as the first tree we checked out was nearly perfect 🙂
Too bad we have to throw this tree out today or tomorrow
Yes it seems a shame to throw them out… but there is always next year….
Christmas tree? Check. Christmas concert? Check. Presents? Check. Family gathering? Check. Friends gathering too? Double check. The special treat just for my partner and I? A boxing day kitten. Awww…..
Glad you folks had a fab Christmas! And happy new year too!
Thank you 🙂
A little kitten for Christmas sounds surely nice, we would love one as well but I think its better for now that we dont have any extra pets, barely have time for the current ones!
Hahah! Has Nathan been relegated to the ‘pet’ category or is that you?? 🙂
Both of us and our two bunnies 🙂
Hahaha!!! That’s right!! 🙂