Monday, 17 December 2012

The Christmas Dilemma


The Christmas Dilemma

Each Christmas our whanau gathers at the home in Wellington, for a Christmas Day lunch. The style of the function has evolved over the years. In the late 1980s and 1990s it was the older generation with their adult children, then the adult children started to have their own children. Cousins have attended, but as their family grows, they have now dispersed with people in Wellington, Auckland and London. This year no cousins will be in Wellington over Christmas. For a period of time there was the high excitement of presents and young kids. Now the youngest child is eight and our daughter is oldest of her generation at seventeen. The babies who belong to the cousins will be Wanaka and Auckland. So a relaxed Christmas lunch with the whanau; fine food and drink, joyous conversation, and hopefully good weather, will embrace us all. A wonderful Wellington day with us sitting outside and having lunch is my ideal.

Lunch this year is at my sister’s home. Her husband is a meteorologist. He will cop the flak for his personal responsibility for any inclement weather.

I generally offer to bring meat for the barbecue, one component of the meat is sausages. This year I bought a sirloin steak, I will marinate this and cook on the barbecue. There will be fourteen people for lunch and the steak should feed them all. However the vexed question is: What sausages do I bring? Just as life is diverse so are my relatives’ tastes in sausages. The older generation are in their eighties and all of them like a simple sausage, my nieces and nephew are not keen on sausages that excite the taste buds. And you know what I prefer. So with the aim to please them all; but also trying to educate the whanau on the wider points of sausage I appreciation so I need to put some thought to this.

Look out for a further post on the outcome of the great sausage decision.  

 

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