Christmas

So Christmas has been & gone. It was definitely different out here, although everyone went to a lot of trouble to try & make it as normal as possible. We were fairly lucky this year as it fell on Thursday/ Friday, although quite alot of the guys here had to work through and some had to go in on Christmas afternoon for a few hours but luckily for us not him indoors. We started off by having a "Carols by candlelight" service on Christmas Eve, organised by one of the ladies here, she did a fab job, although as we were all singing, prayer time started, so for a while We Three Kings etc was competing with the local Mosque (Iam not sure what they thought of that, but no-one came to tell us to shut up!)Afterwards we had mince pies in the Social Club and the kids from the school here put on their Nativity play again for all the adults. Then as we live in the desert we all had a BarBQ. It was actually a very pleasant evening, we came home the girls went to bed and we all got up on Christmas morning, opened presents etc as normal.......then we went swimming...because it was 25degrees and we could! The lady who had organised the carol service & her family came to the pool as well and she disappeared off to put her turkey in the oven & came back with mulled grape juice (almost like mulled wine but not quite!) Anyway we managed to have a pretty normal Christmas dinner, we deep fried the turkey in the American's turkey fryer, and had most of the usual veg but no sprouts, leeks or any pork obviously..so almost like Christmas dinner but not quite. It was a pretty quiet day on the whole as boxing day certainly did not exist - everyone was back at work at the normal time. We are off to the beach for New Year for a couple of days, which again will be like swimming on Christmas Day - a first!. Happy New Year to you all.