First day back from the bonus ten-day Christmas-New Year break, and I’m chatting to my colleague about our levels of busyness. We’re on the same floor, but it different departments, and we both admitted, in half embarrassed whispers, that there wasn’t a lot of urgent work to be done.
‘Oh yes I love January,’ I said to her. ‘All those public holidays and then you come back to work and it’s usually quiet enough to get sorted for the year ahead.’
My office buddy is from the UK; this is her first Christmas down under. She can’t believe how different January is in the work place here.
‘At home, January is the very worst month,’ she said. ‘You have a very short holiday and then you’re back to work and the weather’s terrible and you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark and spring’s a long way away and people get the winter blues and more workers get sick in January than in any other month of the year’.
We’re so lucky. January, the way it’s done here, is the perfect, slow start to the year in my book. By February it’s all systems go again and we are plunged into the busyness of another working year. January is the cruisey time to have a holiday and then get the filing and tidying, the preparation and the forward planning done.
Same at home. I had nothing on in the last week of 2010, and most of my mob was away to boot. So I tidied and cleaned and threw out. Areas like the attic and the window seat that I don’t have a hope of tackling in the rush and bustle of a normal working week.
Getting really organised makes me feel happy and relaxed – sad but oh so true.
And, much as I love it, it’s always a relief to get Christmas over for another year. Christmas at our place we willingly do a lot of church. The kids’ pageant at 7pm on Christmas Eve. ‘Midnight Mass’ – not that it’s mass nor is it quite midnight, but the alliteration is irresistible. Carols, candlelight, a hushed air of expectation. Great stuff. And then church again at 9.30 Christmas morning.
We wimped out on the regular Sunday service Boxing Day morning. Our excuse was that we were having 20 people to lunch – another wussing out that I’m sure would not have been acceptable to our grand-mothers, or even mothers.
My folks came on the 25th, my husband’s on the 26th. All pretty relaxed except for the fact that His Nibs, who does the lion’s share of the cooking on these occasions, had a flustered moment with the rubbish bin and came down hard, very hard, on the edge of the kitchen bench resulting in a spectacularly split lip.
Two hours, two fainting episodes and several stitches later, we got back from casualty in time to welcome our first batch of Christmas guests and the show went on.
This was our first Christmas without all the kids at home – a watershed. Skype went a long way toward easing the pain of missing the family members in Paris and Edinburgh, and the world didn’t end because we weren’t all together. Being away from the ones you love is a whole heap easier than it used to be, that’s for sure. Except that you can’t hug them. And I do mind that.
So, that was Christmas at my place. A couple of weeks back at work now and then a fortnight at the beach, armed with sunscreen and library books. Not bad. Not bad at all. With luck, I’ll come back to face the real start of the year – February, raring to go.