Christmas morning

It rained! In a year of drought with very few rain days, it rained on our picnic. I shouldn't complain too much. The ground was wet and we got one shower of rain just after the cooking started. When Santa arrived the rain stopped and right at the end, the sun was shining.

About 300 people turned up to share Christmas breakfast with us. There were older people, couples and singles, families with lots of children; some people brought their dogs along. There were little girls in fairy dresses and boys in spiderman outfits running around. Everyone was welcome to come along so we had people we help throughout the year as well as those who came to meet others and enjoy Christmas morning with their neighbours. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. It's great to see a community coming together like that.

We served muesli, cereal, yoghurt, milk, bacon, sausages, eggs and tomatoes, all sorts of fruit, bread, fruit, tea, coffee, flavoured milk, juice and water. Later there were cakes and chocolates.

This is my daughter-in-law, Cathy, my step son Jens - whose bald head is all you can see, and Bernadette, all preparing the fruit.

About 20 people came over during the morning and thanked me for organising the event. I made contact with members of one of our local churches who made a commitment to donating a sum of money to us each quarter to be used for our emergency relief food program.

We started packing up at 10.45 am, took the left-over food back to the Centre and just quickly put the cold food in the fridge. Our meeting room looks like a bomb has gone off in there but no one had the energy to do more. We'll go up next Wednesday and clean up again.

When Hanno and I came home, we sat down with a cup of tea and both went to sleep. : - ) It was a great morning, well worth the effort we put in and definately something we'll do again next year.