Yesterday was the annual six-hour round trip to visit my Grandmother’s house for the family Christmas get together. My father’s side of the family has slowly diverged over the years since my childhood when we used to have a special Christmas morning breakfast in just the next suburb over. Everyone would hop in the car and be there a few minutes later, when now people are travelling from Queensland, Canberra and even America to be there.

My dad is one of five boys. That means a lot of uncles, aunties and cousins. We spanned a large range of ages from newborn to 15ish. With so many kids running around, Christmas was a big deal with loads of presents and seeing family we didn’t see that often. Each year my grandparents would cook a great big tub of frankfurts and we used to have hotdogs for breakfast. It seems odd now, but as a kid you were so excited with all the toys you’d eat anything put in your hand. I guess it was also cheap to feed a lot of kids. We even had our photo taken one year and were on the front page of the local newspaper. I must see if we can dig that up.

Years ago my grandparents moved to a rural area near Lake Macquarie, and another family moved to Queensland. With another family already in Canberra, our tradition changed from Christmas morning to the weekend before Christmas.

Now it’s only my grandmother and all the cousins of my generation are getting jobs, moving and can’t be there on the day, the dynamic is different. I did get to see two of my cousins I hadn’t seen for two (or more) years, but as usual we could only stay a few hours before hopping in the car again.

I have not long returned from a great evening with the girls. In belated celebration of mine and Becky’s birthdays, Becky and Rebecca journeyed down from BrisVegas and held us a special ‘Do’ full of laugher and frivolty.

It was so wonderful to see the ladies again and spend time to catch up with everyone. We played games, from pool through to Taboo, and ate lots of naughty foods. One possible highlight of the evening was me trying to express “Cottage Cheese” in a round of Taboo. My team (Carla and Rebecca) had the Cheese bit down pat, but when I tried to describe the first word as “A little house in the country with lots of flower gardens” Carla screamed out “Parmesan!”. Another great moment was Sophie trying to protray “Breed” by saying “Tyson is the only one in the room allowed to do this”. I’m not sure Sophie’s up to date with the latest legislation.

Speaking of Carla, it was so wonderful to see her again as I only ever get to catch up with her at the latest birthday party. There are still severe remnants of our high school years, during which we spent all day, every day together due to our timetables being the same. Check out this wonderful gift she bought me.

Special thanks also to Zoe who put her love and tears (and maybe a little arsenic) into a batch of cupcakes baked for me. You know how much I loved the “Cupped Cakes”! Shame everyone else ate them! My other great present was a sheet of name tag stickers from the ’70s Ursula picked up from a closing down time-capsule of a shop. It’s even better that the name on the stickers is Darren!

What a great night! Thanks to Becky and Rebecca for organising and hosting the evening. Photos are a bit on the scant side, but Rebecca took a number of photos (as did I on her camera), so I’ll post some of those when I get them.

It’s time to pop into the time machine and travel back three years to see what my 18th Birthday was like. Well, sorta. It fell on the day my Economics HSC exam (murder, anyone?) but Becky was gracious enough to bake me a magnificent brownie cake. Yes, a giant slab of brownie. It was sensational. Well, the little I got to eat of it.

Becky had even planted my face on the top of the cake with icing sugar, but that wasn’t enough to stop Laura from plowing into it the second I had my back turned. Lucy, cropped from the right of the photo below, also tested it for poison before I got to it. As you can see above, there was already a large chunk missing around the top and right of the cake.

Being our last HSC exam, Carla and I had a box each of textbooks to return to the school. We were walking around the school, the cake atop my pile, handing the textbooks back and saying goodbye, when I turned a corner, tripped a little and sent the cake catapulting into the air only to land face down (literally) onto a rusty drain grill. Carla and I looked at each other with crazed desperation as if we were facing a grim murder scene (and we could well have). We both knew instantly what had to be done as we crazily stomped the rest of the cake through the grill, disposing of the evidence, vowing never to speak of it again for our own safety and protection from Becky.

Years later I confessed to Becky the fate of that cake, cowering from her verbal and no doubt physical abuse. Instead she said, “Oh, if I had known, I would have made you another one!” I guess sometimes you never know how someone is going to react!

So this is “twenty one”? I must say, it feels a lot like twenty, with a few more failed expectations.

I had a really nice day yesterday. I got to bed around 1ish on my actual birthday morning after having seen the uni show I worked on for a while, so I had a nice sleep in for my birthday. By the time I got up and sorted myself out, I had time to watch Corpse Bride before heading out to the family lunch.

Lunch was nice and relaxing with nice food. Different types of bread with assorted things on them, chicken things, battered vegetables (good clean food). We also had cake so thick that my heart almost handed in its resignation letter upon sight of it. It was a pleasant lunch, and it’s nice to see our extended family is still able to recycle conversations and pretend they hadn’t happened before.

I lounged around in the afternoon and helped my parents set up their oversized new television before heading out to Greg and Adam’s to join Min for a spot of Indian (food) and Idol. Moments after we arrived Adam came panting down the stairs to present the banner below.

A beautiful application of Microsoft Word there, which Adam proudly boasted he was able to concieve and produce quickly having “only just thought of it”. Upon inspecting the old photo of me closest to the camera, Greg asked, “Was that before you started vomiting?”. Charming (although I *was* pudgier then).

The birthday greetings came through thick all day, so I want to thank Min, AJ, Kit, Zoe, Dave, Tim, Becky, Bec (the local one), Kass, Troy and Kevin all for their lovely (and in once instance mildy-dirty) SMS, eMails and MySpace “hit-ups”. That’s not mentioning the few people who sent me messages in the days leading up saying they were wishing me a happy birthday, but forgot the actual day. Because they don’t deserve it. Kidding. Rest assured, I was delighted to hear from everyone.

And now we start the decline to christmas (I heard rumours of a return of the Carols. In fact, they used file footage of me in the choir (probably when I was pudgier) on the news the other night).

In an ingenius plan to direct more hits to his website conceived by fellow blogger Bevis, I have entered the Big Blogger house, where I, together with 11 of my blogging peers (including the entirely sufficient Steph), will take part in weekly BB activities, of course with regular, soul-crushing evictions.

The best part of being in the Big Blogger house (as opposed to the Big Brother house), is that I don’t have to take my clothes off on camera. That’s not to say I won’t. We’ll see how the voting goes. Why am I in the house? No, it’s not for the “journey”, to meet new people, nor the two million dollar prize money, but because I am really looking forward to doing those radio (podcast?) interviews when I’m finally evicted (which will undoubtedly be early because Steph gets more hits than me).

You can check out my first night in the house over at Big Blogger: Night One.