Day 148.

GROAN!

We'd chosen to celebrate Christmas a smidge early with some drinks in the city for Christmas Eve. Well this resulted in us waking up 2 hours later than our Christmas Day schedule planned for! Hey-ho, it's Christmas after all just throw the chicken in late!

Steph and I had been to the Coles in the city as we thought this would be the best place to get enough food to feed 8 backpackers! Well, turns out everyone else has this idea also! Worst. Experience. Of. My. Life. How people do this every year I'll never know!? Granted, leaving EVERYTHING until Christmas Eve in a city probably wasn't the brightest idea, but we managed to get everything it just involved a lot more aggression and death states than I'd been prepared for! This was our contribution to Christmas dinner, therefore Alex was left by himself to cook everything... For 8! 

Now Christmas morning isn't Christmas morning without a special breakfast. We'd decided on making chocolate chip pancakes with strawberries! Yes, they were as delicious as they sound! After our breakfast of champions Alex made a start on our Christmas dinner, the little kitchen never looked so full! While the smell of garlic, chicken and beef filled the apartment and obligatory Christmas movies dominated the TV the rest of us prepared the table (just knives and forks really with a pile of Christmas crackers!) and got ourselves dolled up for our guests arriving!

Rosie was the first to arrive who had prepared a starter for us of home made hummus's - roast pumpkin and chilli, beetroot and cream cheese and then a delicious guacamole with veggie sticks! As we tucked into our starter and our dinner came along slowly as did the thunder clouds and the heavens opening! We'd planned to spend the afternoon on Bondi in the sun... But it literally rained non-stop from noon! Totally scuppering our plan so what else to do but turn to the goon! It's Christmas, you can't judge!

I don't even need to explain how DEVINE the dinner was but, you know, I'm going to anyway. Well it was DEVINE! For someone living off cereal, tuna and white bread for god knows how long a proper roast dinner was bound to taste good but boy did Alex do a good job! We had absolutely everything good and homely: beef, chicken, roast veggies, steamed veggies, sweet potato mash, mash, pigs in blankets, stuffing and a crazy nut roast for those veggies... It was so good I swear I can still taste it now! 

After well and truly gorging myself on Christmas dinner and the rain still going strong we thought it best to have a relaxing afternoon (you know, because my day has been really hard up until now...) and just relax with a game of charades, more Christmas movies until we had room for our desserts. Ok so we got 4 desserts. We couldn't help ourselves! We got a white chocolate mud cake, an orange and poppyseed cake and 2 chocolate log rolls all served with fresh cream! We were having one good meal and we were going all out on it!! There wasn't enough time to take a photo because it was like a locus plague when they were put out, but it's safe to say they went down a storm.

With everyone completely fed and watered we began our Secret Santa! Now usually I'm a total grinch when it comes to Secret Santa because I just never know what to buy and I usually end up with something rubbish! HOWEVER, I'm glad I participated because even though my present may have been lousy the present I pulled out was exactly the one I wanted!! It was a cute Australian koala key ring, a huge chocolate star and a set of stick on moustaches!

I really thought spending Christmas away from home would have been quite sad and made me slightly homesick... Well sorry mum, but I wasn't at all! It was a chance to spend a Christmas totally different to any other, surrounded by friends I'd met along the way and also a big bunch of new ones! I couldn't of wished for a better first Christmas away from home... What I did realise is waking up and not receiving a pile of materialistic presents is not what gages your quality of a day but waking up and being surrounded by awesome people and family is what made my day truly special and I'm glad I've realised that now! Well once your Christmas hangover wears off anyway...

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