Our ship came in!

Some of the backlogged Christmas parcels arrived with the boat on the 26th, it was like winning the lottery at the post office! Not to mention the wine and beer arrival! Cheers!

Christmas under the palms

We're back into the saddle and have the house full as of boxing day, but we had the weekend to ourselves. So, we had all the family over for a Christmas bash, it was Punarii's christening, one of my nephews (I have a few, five at last count!).

 

It all worked out great in the end, after a bit of drama, because (predictably), the boat was late and so our champagne and beer spent Christmas day sitting on the dock in Rurutu, to be unloaded on the 26th. Fortunately, a kindly family member filled in, and I made a quite passable pineapple rum punch, so we muddled through! The girls spent most of the day shuttling between the beach and the paddling pool.....

Hotting up for Christmas

Matotea's had her Christmas party at school and is on holiday and Tuati's back with us now too. But I always find it a little tough to get into the festive spirit in the summer heat. I did managed to motivate myself, and got the Tropical Christmas pud made last week, using my home-made glacéed tropical fruits (papaya, pineapple and lychee, yum!) and some freshly dried mango. I'm hoping the pud will be as tasty as the tropical Christmas cake I made last year, though doused in brandy sauce pretty much anything tastes alright. We're going more for a Rurutu style feast this year, (i.e. we decided to forget about the turkey this time) with a Tahitian oven planned for the 25th, though I have got some mussels on order, that I should be about to collect from the plane this morning, at extortionate cost!!! The champers should arrive tomorrow, though the cargo boat has had a couple of difficult trips recently, and has lost several days on its schedule, so the boat due in on the 19th, is now in on the 24th!!!! Fingers-crossed that our beer will have time enough to chill before the big day!

Matotea's snow(men)

Back in December my parents just made it back home, safe and sound, before they were completely snowed in.....a bit of a shock to the system after spending a month here with us. But in good form they
went straight out to build Matotea a snowman!

Which has really piqued Matotea's curosity about snow and what it's really like.....for our second Christmas celebration on the 30th, I bought some fake snow, Matotea and the daughters of our friends Tracey and Gabi (another British-Rurutu couple!) thought it was quite fun.

 

Matotea has her own snowman too, though fortunately he's not likely to melt anytime soon! Sometime soon I'll have to take her on an expedition to experience some REAL snow!

Christmas swing-set

We had guests over Christmas, so while the kids were overwhelmed with the usual abundance of gifts, I had a busy time in the kitchen fixing up our turkey for the 24th (yes, most french families do the whole big dinner the day befre), with taro stuffing, bread-sauce, seurettes confit (done up something to taste a bit like cranberry sauce), roasted yams, braised red cabbage, no brussel sprouts, tropical mince pies and a 'buche de Noel'. For the actual Christmas day we did a slightly more relaxed barbecue style meal. It was fun, but I'm enjoying a well earned couple of days rest before we have a Brit-style re-run on the 30th......

The girls had a great day, LOTs of rather silly toys, lots of princess girlie stuff this year, but the highlight was definitely the swingset that I got sent over from Tahiti - its just like Tahiti now that we have our own playground! 

It took Viriamu and Pierre (a manually inclined guest - what a stroke of luck!) a good while to get the thing fixed up and modified to their liking...

 

....with the assistance of a bit of Hinano

 

All in all it was a merry Christmas!

The Christmas Tree!

As is our tradition, Viriamu and the kids headed up the mountain to
cut down a caribbean pine for our Christmas tree, then we loaded it
up with as many sparkly things as we could find, as well as cinnamon
star biscuits, chocolate baubles and later 'papillotes' (sparkly wrapped chocolate covered marzipans) gifts of our one of our guests, all the way from Grenoble! The pictures are not great but it is VERY shiny...........and Matotea loves it!!!!! She's been singing "Petit Papa
Noel" all day!

The Christmas Tree Saga

A few days before Christmas, we headed up into the mountains to pick out our tree (and have picnic too), we don't have much choice here, so we usually use a Caribbean pine, though people often also use ironwood saplings too. Tuati, Viriamu's son, who's here for the holidays, was keen to prove his strength by cutting down the tree with his machete....

Viriamu trimmed it down to size and got it into the truck....

Matotea and grandpere decorated the tree with all the decorations that we had bought in New Zealand...including the Christmas angel for the top of the tree....

Heimana and grandmere watched.....

The wind blew the tree over in the night and we started all over again. Finally the tree was moved inside and the boys decorated it, at least everyone got a turn! It stayed put there until we pulled it down yesterday...........and ate our gallette du Roi (the 'king' for the day, is the one who finds the little figure baked into the marzipan tart......but Matotea had other ideas!).

Xmas Day

Christmas here is always hectic in a laid back sort of way. As always the kids do the tour of the family, with multiple gift giving sessions, which started on the 24th and went on until New Year.

It was also Heimana's christening (all kids here get christened on the 25th)...

...she was very well behaved, mainly thanks to her godmother's fancy hat/hairdo, which had her mesmerized for the whole of the ceremony. After church we had a family feed here at home, Viriamu roasted a lamb on a spit that he put together himself.

I must admit I was a bit stressed about his homemade contraption, but in the end it all worked out nicely, I was impressed.

Of course there were the obligatory kids everywhere, climbing up the furniture and getting the whole house in a good old mess....Matotea was in her element, this year she's really into the whole Christmas scene and keeping her grubby little fingers off the presents was no easy task!

Here she is on Christmas Eve, quietly hidden away in the grandparents room
reading Barbar's Christmas

Father Christmas brought her a Hello Kitty bouncer (even better the grandparents got her a fairy outfit but more of that later).......and a singing book for Heimana.

At the moment Matotea's 'de-camped' to Meme's house to hang out with her cousins, poor old grandmere and grandpere have been abandoned!

The long Holidays

Christmas and New Year have disappeared in a haze of children and food! On the 23rd we celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary with New Zealand oysters, Cajun shrimp and a sunset to die for. With more than a few moments contemplating all that's happened over the last few years - I think I'm still trying to digest a lot of it! Then it was Christmas which saw us hosting the cousins for our usual BBQ, steak and brochettes (heart kebabs, that the kids just love) with 'Russian salad' (potato salad with beetroot and corn, another Tahitian staple) and pure indulgence with 3 kilos of green-lip mussels......in white wine and garlic, of course.

Boxing day Viriamu's boys arrived.......
On the 28th Tania, Viriamu's good friend and owner of Pension Kanahau in Hiva Oa, showed up somewhat unexpected and transformed our plans for a quiet New Year, as did the last minute booking for a family of six, who have been with us over the New Year up until today! Viriamu and Tania were at the 'Foire de Marseilles' last year, along with a group of other guest-house owners, from across French Polynesia. She's really quite a colorful character, arriving in flamboyant style with a tonne of smoked salmon, foie gras and duck breasts! Her friend Stephane also arrived a few days later loaded with champers and wine!!!! So our celebrations took on a rather up-scale French theme! It was a bit of a shame that a large storm hit around 6pm on the 31st and stayed with us until well into the afternoon of the 1st....so we had to wait for our New Year fireworks. But it was still lots of fun, and we certainly ate A LOT..... On New Years Day we had a traditional Tahitian oven, a welcome contrast to all of the rich European fare.

Now it's the 5th and the New Year celebrations here in Rurutu have not yet finished, we are in the midst of our traditional 'Tere' festivities, a series of three island tours, hosted by each main village in Rurutu. This holiday lasts 'til the end of the week, we also have the Epiphany and the 'Galettes des Roixs' somewhere in the middle. Today is Iro's birthday so there will be more cake and BBQ food again today......but then at the end of the week it really will be finished!

Christmas Balloons

Matotea is just about getting old enough to enjoy celebrating things - not in any deep kind of a way, but we know what a 'cadeau' is and we've noticed the balloons in the local store and post office this week, yesterday I found her busy drawing away, when I asked her what she was drawing she told me 'balloons' - balloon after balloon after balloon
OK, so her cats and fish also look like balloons, but I think they're actually quite good for 26 months.... She's generally just a scribbler, so this is a marked advance.

I'm really looking forward to this Christmas, I think we're going to have fun. We haven't started decorating the house yet, Viriamu is typically low key about the whole thing, but we need to get moving on the whole thing, before the island's supply of balloons disappears from the stores.