Roots Can Fly

During my last visit back to the States, I finally managed to go through some of the family china that my mom has been keeping for me in her cupboard.  There's a full dinner set of my great-grandmother's that I have always loved.  The problem, of course, is moving a full dinner set of antique china from Arizona to New Zealand.  It's fragile, and it's surprisingly heavy -- they don't make things like this anymore!  A full dinner plate weighs almost one pound!  In the end, I just sorted through this dinner set, made an inventory of what's there, and wrote a list of the pieces I'd like to claim as mine.  Then I put it all back in the cupboard. Getting it all over here seemed like an insurmountable task at the moment.  I'll get there though, I do have a bit of a plan now.  It involves packaging and mailing some and hand-carrying some on my next trip.

For now, however, I did bring a different set of plates back. These ones are a gorgeous pattern called Singapore Bird.  They were a wedding gift to my mom and dad, a gift from my grandmother's friends.  It's not a full dinner set but more like a dessert set.  There's medium sized plates and tea cups and saucers. I brought the plates... and one tea cup.  The weight of just that was more than the allowable weight of a carry-on on Air New Zealand.

Happy New Year!

 

Only in the Southern Hemisphere can I write a blog post about Christmas/New Years and making a pie from freshly picked cherries!  

It’s been an awfully long time since I wrote a new blog entry about anything at all -- and my excuse is not a novel one.  Things have been busy!  We’ve moved into a new house in Dunedin (photos to come) and we absolutely love it.  We bought a new (to us) car – a simple 2002 Toyota and my absolute thrilled excitement about it is justifiable when I explain that my previous car was a 1989 Toyota that we paid $200 for! I’ve been studying and working and these things are going well…  My mom has come and gone – she came for 3 weeks to experience the oddities of Christmas in mid-summer.  And last but surely not least, I was recently diagnosed with a health condition that requires some managing.  I won’t write about it right here right now, but it has been a significant experience.  

What do all these things have in common?  They have all greatly impacted and primarily advanced how “at home” I feel in New Zealand.  Indeed this last year, overall, my 5^th in New Zealand, has been some sort of a turning point in feeling more peacefully settled in this country.  More on some of these things later…  But for now, a couple of little things.  This year, I got to make Christmas sugar cookies with my mom just like the old days, but with some New Zealand flare.

And, on my way home from my in-laws at the end of a lovely Christmas Day, I realized that it didn’t feel quite like Christmas was complete yet – because I hadn’t been to the beach!!!  Goodness, I am turning a little bit more Kiwi afterall.  

So on the way home, I made a quick detour and felt much better.

And what did I do on New Year’s Day?  Well I went for a long, hot tramp (hike). 

 And on January 2^nd I picked gorgeous, fresh cherries straight off their abundantly covered trees at an orchard in Cromwell.  And on January 3^rd, I made a delicious cherry pie.   

Now that’s a good start to a new year in mid-summer that I could turn into a tradition and get very used to!  

 

 And Happy New Year!     

A Glass of Wine and the Evening News

It is 3 weeks from the shortest day of the year, so James and I are spending a bit more time inside this time of year. I've been doing some cooking and we have some unknown fellow-American expats coming for dinner this Thursday and James' bday dinner on Saturday. We've been running our heatpump and filling the fire with wood everyday to stay warm. I’m reading a lot (the classic Gone With the Wind right now) and wondering if I’ll get out the sewing machine. James has projects spread out across our table. It’s nice.


We’ve also installed Free TV. NZ is going digital, so getting the new dish and box to convert our old TV was a soon-to-be necessity anyway. We've gone from about 5 channels to about 12. I was surprised and ecstatic to realize that the American PBS Newshour is on one of those channels at 6:30 pm every night! In my humble opinion, New Zealand news leaves much to be desired. The evening news features about ½ hour of NZ news, about 5 minutes of international news, 20 minutes of sports and 10 minutes of weather. When we watch the evening news, I only watch the first 35 minutes, then get frustrated as coverage turns to regional rugby matches as if there wasn’t a whole world out there to report on. After the news, the two main channels each feature a sort of investigative news show for another half-hour. It is typically an elaboration on a couple of stories already featured in the evening news, going into more detail in a ‘surface’ manner, dramatizing un-dramatic events. I can’t watch them. The world beyond the shores of NZ doesn’t seem to exist in these mainstream news outlets.  Now, after the first 30 mins of NZ news, I can turn to the PBS Newshour for US and international news.

New Traditions - Part II : Christmas and New Years

Several New Zealand Christmases ago, James and I camped out on a beach on Christmas Eve. It was just on a whim at the time, but it proved to be a simple way to build in a little time alone as a new, young family of our own starting a tradition or two. It's become subtly important to me - squeezing in a bit of my own agency before heading off for the NZ family gatherings. 

This year, with our two Alaskan friends, we headed down to the Catlins on Christmas Eve.  The Southerly blowing in from Antarctica with gale force winds and hail mandated one small adjustment: We stayed in a friend's 'crib' instead of tents.  This crib is a favorite spot for James and I. It's an old house from the area's logging and railroad days. Today it's in the middle of nowhere, along some unnamed gravel roads. And it's quirky. Very quirky.

New Traditions

I think migrants engage in a conscious process of deciding which old traditions to purposefully carry on, which to abandon (willingly or reluctantly) and which host country traditions to adopt.

And sometimes, you just make up something new.

 

This holiday season has been a conglomeration of all these strategies.

So this entry backtracks to Thanksgiving. Actually, for a moment, I’ll jump back to Thanksgiving 2006 when several of our American friends and family were gathered in NZ for our upcoming wedding.  With no means to create a proper Thanksgiving dinner, all the American guests ordered Indian take-out, sat around a picnic table, and toasted this unorthodox celebration. 

This is a precious memory to me and to all, so I’ve heard, who were there.

But I’ve also wanted to integrate a traditional Thanksgiving dinner into my NZ life. It’s my favorite holiday and as America’s newest citizen, James has embraced Thanksgiving like nobody’s business as well.  But we’ve never pulled it off here in NZ and this year I began to get awfully discouraged – some traditions just aren’t transferable, even with considerable, conscious effort. 

This year, I planned to go all out - 3 Americans would be visiting! But late November is early summer here. A really busy time for everyone. Our 3 friends were travelling around NZ, James was climbing Mt. Cook and I was home alone.  Locally, it’s an ordinary work day – Thursday is not a day for cooking and gathering and “Black Friday” is not a day for recovering and shopping.  And even if I had remembered to collect my family’s recipes, I realized half the ingredients aren’t available here. (Cheese Whiz! What’s Thanksgiving without Cheese Whiz!?!  If you aren’t with me on that one, how about cranberry sauce? Pumpkin pie? Turkey? Getting the picture?) 

James with his favorite Thanksgiving dish.

Embracing Summer Christmas

Summer Christmas.

As unnatural as the juxtaposition of those words might be, I’m trying to embrace this crazy reality.  I have slowly stopped saying, “It’s just WRONG.  Christmas in summer is WRONG.”  I have oppressed this sentiment and replaced it with the expression, “Christmas in summer is, well, different.”  Progress, even if I am gritting my teeth while saying it.

Gift tags from the New Zealand post.

My mission to embrace summer Christmas has involved looking for summer-Christmas paraphernalia – like cards and wrapping paper.  Ideally, I hoped to find these things not just in generic form, but specific to New Zealand.  I had to search in several stores before finding a few selections of stationary depicting kiwis (the birds) wearing Santa hats and red jandals (flip flops). Ah yes, a bit of Kiwiana mixed into my Christmas. That’s what I was after.  But really, they were all pretty ugly cards. I wasn’t sold. The choices are so limited that I have begun to think New Zealand itself is perhaps working on embracing summer-Christmas. Ask the locals and they associate Christmas with barbeques, beer, beaches and jandals.  But go by the decorations, cards and gift wrap, which are all covered in snowmen, snowflakes, dark wintery scenes with twinkling lights, and I think that perhaps, just perhaps, even Kiwis know that Christmas in summer is just WRONG.

I mean different.

And, while looking for said stationary and gift wrap, the stores weren’t even playing Christmas music.

That’s different too.

The cards I finally settled on.  Depictions of Kiwiana Christmas!