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Wednesday 22 December 2010

Christmas Time

If there is no joyous way to give a festive gift, give love away.
Author Unknown



So, that whole 'writing regularly' plan went really well! It's just like with my diary, I plan to write as often as I can, but I can guarantee that about 80% of my diary entries start with something along the lines of 'it's been a long time!' I'm useless!


To be fair though, not long into Production Week, I discovered that I had no time whatsoever to keep my blog updated if I also wanted to eat/sleep/breath as well. Getting to uni at 5pm, wallpapering and painting flats, moving heavy furniture about (in the snow!) and other such busy things, then leaving at 1am and getting home to find that I was wide awake and hungry meant that I didn't get to bed till gone 4am every night/morning. I ended up dragging myself out of bed at about 2pm, grabbing a shower and something to eat and sitting doing nothing useful for a couple of hours before starting it all again. Don't get me wrong though...it was an amazing week, resulting in three amazing shows, getting even better every night.



(Two of the gorgeous sets, courtesy of the amazing set designer Jamie, and the amazing backstage team!)

My work suffered though, only managing to fit in an E-Publishing blog at about 4am before crashing. Which kinda sucked when I had a sixty page script due two weeks after. Needless to say, the last two weeks have been a complete nightmare! Sixty pages is...a lot. To say the least. My lecturers keep saying that we should be able to handle the workload because we're third years, but if I'm honest, that assignment was just ridiculous. One good thing though...producing 17,000 words of script in pretty much two weeks makes me feel pretty good about producing 10,000 words of dissertation in two months! 

Anyway...CHRISTMAS! I absolutely love Christmas, it's without a doubt my favourite time of year (apart from my Birthday of course...who doesn't love a day when everybody has to be nice to you just because you were born?!) But Christmas is special, it makes me happy. I love spending time with my family and just having fun for a whole week. I always spend New Year with my family as well, because I like to start a new year with the people most important to me.

I actually love Christmas Eve more than Christmas Day, because of the excitement and also because of the tradition my family has on Christmas Eve. One of the best things about the 12 year age gap between me and my brother is that just as I stopped believing in Santa, Cameron came along and I got to join in with making it special for him too, which added to the enjoyment. Every Christmas Eve, we open our first presents... Christmas pyjamas from my mum. Then it's the Christingle  service at church at 3pm, then (usually) my granny and granddad come to our house for a Chinese buffet. This year however, we're doing things in reverse, and instead of them coming to our house, we're going to theirs. (They just sold their big house and moved into a smaller bungalow, so Christmas Day will be at our house instead.)


Then when we're all full up and sleepy, we're going to get in our pjs and watch The Nativity, then Cameron will go to bed and me and my mum will play Santa...probably my favourite part of the night! Being involved makes me wonder how I never managed to hear anything going on as a kid...because me and my mum always end up in fits of giggles when we're making talcum powder footprints across the living room floor! 

(Cameron playing Santa himself!)

On Christmas morning, my mum will probably end up waking us up...she's always too excited and can't sleep! We'll get up and open our presents, have some breakfast and then go to Church. This year is special because as I said, Christmas Dinner is going to be at our house, which means the Christmas Day Roles have been passed down to me and my mum...my mum is gunna do all the cooking and I'm gunna...help. Or more than likely I'll just get in the way! 



So yeah, that's pretty much my Christmas plans! Christmas Day evening will be spent lazing about drinking mulled wine, and then Boxing Day is the usual party at my uncle's house! I can't wait!  I hope everybody else has a great Christmas :)