Christmas month

Decem­ber, my favourite month of the year. I do hope we have some more vis­i­tors over Christ­mas. In the past we have had such a won­der­ful time with guests from Europe, Asia, and Amer­ica shar­ing sto­ries and customs.

One par­tic­u­larly mem­o­rable year we had guests from Ger­many and on Christ­mas Eve they joined me, John and some friends. We all swapped sto­ries about our dif­fer­ent cus­toms; food, car­ols, gift giv­ing, etc. I felt the spirit of Christ­mas very pro­foundly as we sang together in Ger­man and Eng­lish the beau­ti­ful carol Silent Night. It was a cool damp evening but we felt cosy with a warm­ing drink and some yummy food and wrapped up in rugs. As I write this I’m won­der­ing why we didn’t come inside. I’m pleased we didn’t, it might have bro­ken the spell.

Another year we had a warm­hearted and inter­est­ing lady who had recently retired as a Pro­fes­sor of His­tory from an Eng­lish uni­ver­sity. She had been with us for three weeks by Christ­mas, even help­ing me make the cake, so as a friend, by now, joined in all the cel­e­bra­tions with our fam­ily includ­ing com­ing with us to mid­night mass. Clearly that was also another blessed Christmas.

The par­cel is sent, and indeed has arrived, to Lon­don, the gifts have been bought, menu decided, some gifts wrapped, so now I have to dec­o­rate the house and tree, prac­tise car­ols with the grand­chil­dren, fin­ish wrap­ping gifts and pre­pare the food. I love it all.

Welcome to our new website

Wel­come to our new web­site. Thanks to my son and his girl­friend who are help­ing and encour­ag­ing us from Lon­don, as this is all very new to us.

We have lived in New Zealand all our lives — Napier in fact — apart from an eigh­teen month work­ing hol­i­day ten years ago. Dur­ing our time over­seas we stayed in many and var­ied B&B’s and loved the expe­ri­ence. Hence the rea­son for start­ing our own home­s­tay. We so missed meet­ing all those new and inter­est­ing peo­ple and we had the room so decided to share our beau­ti­ful home with like-minded people.

I’m going to use this blog to write about our home­s­tay, Napier and vis­it­ing New Zealand. Both John and I are pas­sion­ate about home­s­tay­ing and we are con­stantly thrilled and stim­u­lated by the delight­ful and inter­est­ing peo­ple we meet. We have often dis­cussed this with friends and have con­cluded that peo­ple who travel may be espe­cially inter­est­ing and genial. We’re look­ing for­ward to this sea­son and most par­tic­u­larly see­ing again the peo­ple who stayed with us last year. I expect we will again have great fun dress­ing up and shar­ing clothes for Art Deco week. It is always enchant­ing shar­ing the fun of dress­ing up our grand­chil­dren with our vis­i­tors. These lit­tle peo­ple, when they are around, also enjoy meet­ing our guests.

How blessed are we. As I write this I real­ize we have what every­body wants, a job that is both stim­u­lat­ing and fun. Well that wasn’t so dif­fi­cult, my son will be proud of my first attempt at writ­ing a blog.