How Late is Too Late?

Dead Christmas trees littered the curbside weeks ago. The candy canes disappeared from store shelves even before that. Suddenly it's the end of January and there's that niggling feeling that we should consult our calendar more often, and oh, just maybe, perhaps, TAKE DOWN OUR CHRISTMAS LIGHTS ALREADY!

The traditionalists reading this are probably wondering why we still have Christmas lights up on January 31st. Truthfully, they didn't take all that much effort to put up: there were no 20-foot ladders, feral animals in the eaves, or snow squalls to contend with, or anything like that. It was more like, untangle one strand of lights, get out the clear packing tape, and tape them up around the front window. On the inside. (One point for apartment living!) It's not like it'll be a massive effort to take them down.

But, we wonder, is there really a magic date to take down the Xmas lights?

After taking a very informal poll of opinions of those around us, we've heard some say that the beginning of March should be the very last deadline for Xmas lights still being socially acceptable (as it's pretty gloomy up to then, but spring is definitely on its way after that); others say February's when enough is enough; and there's the school of thought that Boxing Day is when it's all over for the lights. Not surprisingly, there's many opinions online about it too — including a Facebook group titled "Take Your Damn Christmas Lights Down". (The group has 97 fans.)

As people who haven't owned Christmas lights in a long time (OK, we did try to put some up inside our van back in Australia, but they tended to drain the car battery), getting back into these little nuances of northern hemisphere culture is still something we stumble over now and then. And we're a bit torn on the whole issue. Even if the Christmas cookies are eaten and the presents have been opened, it is still nice to come home after work to electric holiday cheer — though maybe it's more about denying that bitter, awful winter that has yet to come. Maybe the same sort of that seasonal denial that kept some of us (not naming any names here!) wearing flip-flops well into October. But after taking a visual poll of our street, we've found that at least four other houses are still proudly lighting their houses for Old St. Nick. So bah humbug that!
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OK, seriously though. How about you take our handy reader's poll and tell us what you really think, so we don't have to go consulting Yahoo! Answers or anything like that. Or Google, for that matter!

Merry Christmas!

There's something about the routine of family holidays that make us feel like we weren't off on the other side of the world for two Christmases. Big dinners, plenty of drinks, chitchat with family members, lots of cookies... somehow Xmas this year was the same as always.

Breaking with routine wasn't terrible: celebrating Xmas while hiding from the Australian heat in an air-conditioned cabin-style hotel room (and in the pool) last year was quite the experience. Sharing big dinners with an international crowd (while avoiding the heat again in the a/c) in Melbourne the year before that was another memorable way to spend the holiday. It's was always a bit weird to spend Christmas in summertime, but it was nice to not have to wear sweaters and slippers! It was fun to call home on Christmas while on the road... but now the funerary jokes about us "being in a better place" and "it's too bad they can't be with us this Christmas" will have to stop. :)

There were some new additions to our families since we left-- a few tiny nieces (Adrian's family), a wiener dog 'nephew' (who dressed up festively as a reindeer for Dayle's family) who made things a little more interesting. The snow has mostly kept away (great, in our opinions!). Sadly, Dayle's favourite holiday ice cream-- PC Candy Cane Fudge Crackle, yum!-- seems to be missing from all of the Zehrs & No Frills stores she's been hunting for it at. Yarrr! And after years of daydreaming about it too...

Hope everyone had a merry Christmas... it was great catching up with everyone, and thanks for all the great loot! All the best to you guys in the new year. xoxo, d&a

Merry Xmas from us!

Melbourne Xmas (11)
Originally uploaded by bigquestionmarks.

Merry Christmas and happy new year everyone! We've been soaking up the atmosphere of Melbourne for the past few days and loving it. Our first few days were a bit chilly, but it's definitely getting hotter (33 today, hotter than Cairns). We've even been taken by surprise by city sunburns, and we're now slathering on the sunscreen!

We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas-- we did, weird as it was to have no snow, no Xmas cookies, and no family nearby. (Miss ya all!) We spent Xmas Eve with our surrogate French family-- us and five Frenchies parked ourselves al fresco at a long table at an Italian restaurant hidden down a small cobblestoned side street in Melbourne's CBD (in Australia they call downtown "the CBD", aka Central Business District). We sat around eating yummy Italian food and drinking wine for more than five hours (those French like their long dinners-- apparently so do we!). Christmas Day was extra lazy... lazing in a giant hotel bed, watching movies on TV like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (the live, Jim Carrey version, was actually pretty good!) and Babe ("That'll do, pig"). Then it was off to meet another international bunch for our good friend--and fellow pear-picker-- Andreas' last night in Melbourne. Andy's from East Germany (you may remember him from past blogs) and heaps of fun, and though we're super sad he's left us to explore South America, we're happy we managed to see him before he took off. With Andy, there were some lovely Italian ladies cooking the feast-- Anna and Marina-- and one Indian and one Malaysian girl to mix it up with a couple of Canucks. Good fun! Melbourne definitely has that international feel, much like Toronto did for us, so it's not hard to feel at home here. On Boxing Day, we dropped Andy off at the airport and then it was time to get onto apartment-hunting...our next true adventure, as it seems.

For those of you who have been to Melbourne before, you'll understand why we LOVE Fitzroy and hope to live there. It's artsy, bohemian, full of cool shops and bars, and just north of the CBD. But it's been a bit of a pain to be in the city with our van-- Adrian's become a brilliant parallel-parker and Dayle's been a super-awesome navigator--so we decided to move south to the beachy suburb of St. Kilda (where there's lots of parking) for a bit while we look for a more permanent place to live. We're in a hostel now-- hard to adjust the first night (how we LOVED our xmas hotel- Miami Hotel) but it's not a terrible place to sleep. Yesterday we went to the beach (not the greatest swimming beach, but hey, it's got sand) and had a nice breakfast out, and pretended we were tourists. Plenty of shopping and drinking temptations in St. Kilda-- it's a really cool neighbourhood, though we wish it was walking distance to downtown-- and we were highly entertained to encounter our first stray cats/prostitutes/drug dealers in ages. Good fun.

Last night we checked out our first apartment... errr, flat, I mean. Lovely sounding in the advertisement (as they always are): courtyard, washing machine, TV, fully furnished, short or long term stays OK. We got there and they forgot to mention: the kitchen stank and lacked a tap for hot water, the bedroom was sans curtains and had the air of a junkie palace, the bathroom was grunge central, there was a packet of rat poison sitting outside one bedroom door, and OH WAIT-- there wasn't a DOOR from the outside courtyard to the inside. It's unbelievable what people try to pass off as a "home". Daisy must have left some rubber on Fenwick Street-- we sped off as quickly as we could.

But, fingers crossed, we'll get out of bunk-bed life soon. For now, while the city is still asleep for the holidays, we'll take in as much beach and cappuccinos as we can (another great Aussie concept we've discovered: when a coffee's included in your breakfast, that means you can get an espresso, a cappuccino, whatever fancy coffee, etc). Soon enough, we'll be working and back to our normal city existences. And the jobs can't come fast enough, because Melbourne is full of exciting stuff to do and fantastic concerts to spend money on (and nooooooo Huntsman spiders, yippee)! Fingers crossed we can somehow get to Big Day Out to see Bjork and Rage Against the Machine at the end of January...