Christmas Eve!

Hey guys, long time no post! Since I got home, I've had to deal with a broken laptop so haven't really been able to get online at all - in fact, right now I'm using my daddy's laptop to write this, ah well.

Sooo...today I want to share with you how I celebrate Christmas. Normally, my family's circle of friends will invite each other around, so we'd have a line of dinner parties scheduled to attend. It's more of a friend thing, since most of our extended families - grandparents, aunts and uncles all live in China. The hosting family will have spent all day cooking up a multitude of yummy Chinese food - no turkey for us *sadface* - but instead, you can expect some homemade fried chicken, pork roast, waterlily and mince patties, seafood of every shape and form, spicy noodle salad, pork rib soup, all of which is cooked the Asian way. That is just a fraction of the dishes that I've come across at Christmas!

Afterwards, the kids will watch a movie together - Mean Girls tends to be a classic, and we'll also play board games like Boggle, Monopoly (another classic), and Game of Life. Meanwhile the adults play cards, drink tea, and chat at the table. Thinking about it, technically, I'm an adult now, but me and my friends still get shunted to the kiddy table at these gatherings since we're of a different generation to the parents.

This year, my family decided to celebrate as a family on Christmas Eve, since my mother wasn't working today! And...we did it British style!

At first, we didn't have a tree up, which was kinda worrying considering how it's Christmas Eve. And our house seriously needed an injection of Christmas spirit hehe...

Much better now! The instrument you can partly see is called the gu zheng and yes, I play it! ^^

We decided to have a traditional British Christmas dinner this year: turkey, cranberry sauce, gravy, potatoes, carrots and Brussels sprouts - forgot to get stuffing but oh well! My parents couldn't resist though, and also served up some homegrown veggies from the allotment and some fish, cooked Chinese style.

Doing it the British way...ish!

Afterwards, we played Mah Jong all evening which was really nice as our family doesn't really spend a lot of time together these days.

Anyway, SJ, if you're reading this, I hope you have a great Christmas, and not to be demanding or anything, but it would be nice to hear from you on how you are doing these days since I'm feeling a bit rocky about us at the moment...*sigh* :(

To everyone else...MERRY CHRISTMAS!! :D

Lots of love,

Yishi xxx