My disastrous Christmas

Christmas balls

In the lead up to Christmas, I’ve been trying to work out, which Christmas’s was most memorable, weird, sad, happy, so on and so forth. I thought it might make a cool little series to read.

Anyway, one that I came up with was my most disastrous Christmas.

I need to give you a little background. When Anthony and I first bought our own farm, we lived in a little ATCO hut, which had three rooms. We didn’t have power for the first five years (we ran off a generator that we starred for three hours (just long enough for the bread maker to make the bread) each night.) and for the first year, we didn’t have a toilet.

When I got married, I was hell-bent on creating a family environment home, even though we didn’t have a family, so after a few years of always going into Esperance to my In-law’s place for Christmas, I decided it was my turn to ‘have Christmas’.

I believe this greeted with much dismay from other members of the family – we had a tiny kitchen, with no more room to swim a cat, let alone fit eight or so people into. This didn’t worry me, I thought we could eat on the lawn.

I ordered all the meat, spent hours preparing yummy things to eat (my gas fridge which only came up to waist, so it fairly small) was over-loaded. So much so, I had to borrow my father-in-law’s fridge which was over at his farm.

The day came, the hut was decorated as well as it could be (can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, though) the table was set up outside and all the visitors started to arrive. My parents were over from SA, so we had the whole gang.

Now, the other thing you have to understand, is my mother-in-law was fastidious. Everything; meals, decorations,  table settings, they all had to perfect. I am the exact opposite.

I am also very competitive and didn’t want my first Christmas to fail.

The rolled chicken roast was cooked and I began to carve… And realised that basically the whole roll was stuffing and there was very little meat. I was horrified. I quickly commandeered mum to help me – having refused anyone’s help for the whole of the day. We decided that we’d roast a few chicken breast I had defrosted and serve them.

Then I realised that the cat had stolen them during a time I hadn’t been watching them, so that option was out of the question. Well, there was plenty of pork.

My dad doesn’t eat pork.

I grabbed some frozen chicken breasts from the freezer, shoved them in the microwave and promptly over defrosted them, so the edges had started to cook. I was just about in tears by this stage.

Lunch ended up being about two hours late and by this time, in the heat of the afternoon, no one was really keen on sitting outside, but they couldn’t come into the small kitchen because that was just as hot! I also seem to remember the sea breeze came in while we were eating and tried to blow the table cloth away and dirt into the pavlova.

All in all, I think is was a rather memorable Christmas, but it was many years before my mother-in-law would brave coming to the farm for Christmas day.