Checklist

Checklist:

Pack a 24cm spring form cake tin, citrus zester, piping bag and nozzles. The husband is packing the knives.
Music – update my iPod, pack the speakers, Elvis christmas CDs.

Presents – stuff for the family, wine, cds. Buy wrapping paper.

Defrost the freezers at work, empty the bins, empty the MilliQ and PBS drums and the water baths, turn off the ovens and incubators and remember to chock the doors open. Change message on voicemail – how do I do that?? Check phone instructions. Throw away last week's agar plates. Turn off all the printers, scanners and computers.

Pack lots of medication to deal with the cat when I get to the city, think about packing gym gear then have a reality check and leave it behind. Shoes, boots? Check the weather forecast. Corsets, skirts and tops, jackets, hats and parasol. Sunscreen and razors. Get nails done. Bathers? Don't be stupid. Confirm flights.

Still haven't decided on an entree for New Years Eve. Prawn cocktail?? Ha! Blini? Rosti? Pate? Thai fish cakes? Something on a stick most likely. Chocolate truffle cake for dessert, hmm, should I make two of them? Will I have enough Margret River chocolate? Check the recipe, confirm guest numbers. Serve with raspberries? Homemade ice cream? Coffee or vanilla? Or chilli chocolate? All three? Make a mini pavlova for the rouge guest who doesn't like chocolate or let him suffer for being a heretic?

Give a key to the chick who is feeding the dog and cat and buy lots of cans of food. Make sure the leash is where I said it would be and that the dog has her tag on her collar. Oh, pay the car rego and the rates. Transfer money to cover the older child.

Stake the tomatoes and spray them with chilli to keep the possums off. Harvest the rhubarb – pack it. Give the veggie patch a really good soaking. Oh yeah, pack the water pistols.

Don't forget to pack the pudding.

I love Christmas. Read more!

Deck the halls

Not much has been happening. Well, life and the general trappings thereof. The past few months, in summary:
· I dragged the child to a car show at 8am in the cold and rain and we stood around with a bunch of other car freaks, freezing. Most were more impressed by my full length, flared skirt, PVC coat than my car. It was so miserable even the coffee vendor decided not to show up.

· Work Christmas party. I behaved myself. Enough said.

· Went to a gig at the ANU bar, which was OK.

The child turns six in a few weeks. Motherhood has certainly given me a new perspective on birthdays, particularly the "birth" part. Ah yes, six years ago I was waddling around like a lame hippo with constant pain from my back, heart burn and unable to sleep. I wanted the baby OUT so I could go back to feeling normal. There's the trap – you never feel normal again. What is normal changes radically. So six years later I am organising a jumping castle and trying to source a piñata. Last year we made a piñata, a little horse which we decorated with streamers and painted brightly. Unfortunately I had underestimated the strength of paper mache and the kids couldn't break it open. This year I will go commercial in the hope they are much more flimsy.

The only thing that has really sent me on a rant recently is the onslaught of Christmas cards. Now, I love Christmas. I love all the food and the presents and decorating the house and wearing silly hats. I adore it. What I don't like is when Christianity gets shoved in there as a way for us to justify our rampant consuming. The sooner people give up trying to give Christmas some sort of Christian significance the better. Try to find any reference to celebrating the birth of Christ in the bible. You can't. The poor bastard wasn't even born in December. Let's just leave him out of it and get back to gorging ourselves with food and drinking ourselves silly.

So let's focus on the original winter solstice celebration - Saturnalia or Yule and acknowledge our heritage. Let's bring an evergreen tree inside the house and decorate it to celebrate the conquest of fertility over the winter cold. Let's kill turkeys and small pigs who are plump with their winter fat and serve them with all the root vegetables that we have stored since autumn. Finish the meal with pudding made from dried fruit, the legacy of summer and a reminder of what's to come. Let's put holly leaves everywhere in homage to the druids who used holly to poison their winter solstice sacrifices and for the Wiccans who see the red holly berries as the red of menstrual blood. And mistletoe - the leaves are an aphrodisiac and the white flowers representative of droplets of the sun god's semen. Oh, and don't forget Santa. This man has become the symbol of what Christmas really is – the merging of a Norse god with a long beard who rode a horse through the sky once a year in autumn, a Saint from 270AD who is the patron of children, fishermen, nudists and prostitutes and an icon created in 1931 by coca cola. Mash them all together then give him the Dutch name "Sinterklaas" and you have the jolly fat man who is truly deserved of our worship.

That's all well and good and totally appropriate IF we lived in the northern hemisphere. But it's not snowing; we aren't triumphing over the winter bleakness. It's 32°C outside and fresh fruit and seafood is in abundance.

My philosophy is – enjoy Christmas, but don't be hypocritical about it. It's a time to get together with family and friends and be thankful for what we have and that we have all survived another year. If you'd rather have prawns and kangaroo steaks on the BBQ, sitting in the backyard under an umbrella sipping cold beer then do it. Why do we still feel obliged to live as if we're English? Moronic retailers spray snow on their windows and even stupider home owners roll out white felt on their roof tops. STOP IT!! We live in the southern hemisphere – deal with it, get used to it, enjoy it!

So when the small child brought home a Christmas card with an angel on the front and "Jesus sends us angels all year to look after us. Happy Christmas" on the inside my blood boiled. I want to send my girl to school with Christmas cards that say "Jesus may love you, but Satan gives you special powers", or cards with pictures of decorated penises that proclaim "May the Goddess bless your womb", or even "Happy Birthday to the Flying Spaghetti Monster". But I can't. There would be outraged parents and the girl would get ostracised. Unfortunately, using my child as a vehicle for my anti-social behaviour goes against my ethics. She is free to choose her own form of rebellion.

I may, however, suggest she draws Christmas trees with red and white balls hanging and that we put "Yule tidings" instead of "Happy Christmas". She has asked that we put a star on top of the Christmas tree this year instead of our usual gothic fairy. Of course we will, but I will explain that it's in homage to the sun god and a celebration of the fertility of the earth, not a beacon to three old blokes wandering about at night, in the middle of winter, looking for an illegitimate baby in a straw filled trough. Read more!