Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everybody! It's pretty crazy, but I'm just about to go to bed on Christmas day, while most of you are just getting started. Some of you, depending on where you are in the world, are still in bed.

Amy and I had a great day. We got up around 6:30 this morning and made breakfast. We opened presents and went to church for 10:30. It was really great. Mom and Dad called while we were in church so I answered and just held the phone there. Darlene Zschech was singing Christmas carols, but when I talked to Mom a few hours later she said she really couldn't make out what was being sung, or who was singing.

Our 3:00 lunch never happened until about 5:00, but it was awesome! Stephen from Ontario and Nolan from Hawaii were here celebrating with us. The food was amazing, and we had real turkey. It was beautiful. There's lots of left-overs, too. I reckon we'll be eating Christmas dinner until March.

Anyway, I need sleep. We'll put up a picture from our day in the next day or two, and we hope to hear from all of you. Maybe just publish a comment about your Christmas... what you ate or what Santa brought you.

We love and miss you all! Merry Christmas!

Ryan

PS - I'm the proud new owner of an iPod Video. It's sick!

A Christmas Carol

Three more days! It's insane. I can't believe it. The malls are crazy here. You can hardly move in any store at any time. I'm really glad that my shopping is done.

This past weekend we had our Christmas Spectacular here at the church. What a great show. They did a modified version of Charles Dickens' timeless tale, "A Christmas Carol"...

What a great set design. It was complete with snowflakes falling from above and real smoke coming out of the chimneys.

It's pretty weird, but they sing many of the same Christmas carols here as we would back home. There's just something a little different to me about singing "I'm Dreaming Of A White Christmas" in Australia, but they do. Here's a bunch of the cast singing "Frosty The Snowman".

It was a packed house. They put this performance on nine or ten times. The overall attendance was over twenty-thousand. In just the four performances on Saturday and Sunday in the Hills, there were over four-hundred people saved.

Here is Santa Clause landing his sleigh on the stage. They really did a great job with this play. The included recognizable Christmas icons such as Santa Clause and Scrooge and Frosty The Snowman, but everything pointed directly to the fact that Christmas is about Jesus. That's what Scrooge figured out in the ending of this story.

Here's the Three Wisemen. They were pretty crazy and really didn't seem that wise, but they did make everyone laugh.

This is Phil Dooley wrapping things up by explaining the real meaning of Christmas, just making sure everyone really understood what the show was all about. They had real goats and sheep and rabbits up on the stage with Mary and Joseph there. When the lights went down I could see a couple of the crew frantically scrubbing one spot in particular on the stage. I'm guessing one of the goats got a bit excited and made a little mess.

Thanks to Paula we'll be watching the real movie "A Christmas Carol" on Christmas Eve. Hope you all have an excellent Christmas. I'm looking forward to the turkey and stuffing and pie and cookies, and I'm pretty sure most of you are too.

Ryan

The Twelve Days Of Christmas

Hi everyone. We're getting closer and closer to the big day. It's starting to feel a bit more like Christmas now. I'm not sure, but I think it's the Relient K Christmas album, "Deck The Halls, Bruise Your Hand," that's really getting me in the Christmas spirit. There's just something about punk rock Christmas carols that gets me excited.

Anyway, I just thought I would share this with you... The Twelve Days Of Christmas... Australian style...

On the twelfth day of Christmas,
My true love sent to me,
Twelve possums playing,
Eleven lizards leaping,
Ten wombats washing,
Nine crocs a-snoozing?
Eight dingos dancing,
Seven emus laying,
Six sharks a-surfing,
Five kangaroos,
Four lyrebirds,
Three wet galahs,
Two snakes on skis,
And a kookaburra in a gum tree.

This is what they really sing here. Weird, hey.

Ryan

Our Stockings Are Hung

Merry Christmas, everyone.

We put up our Christmas tree! Amy and I, along with Stephen and our Swedish housemates, Simon and Elisabeth, got a beautiful tree on Monday and decorated that same night. Amy and I also bought a miniature tree for our bedroom. It's one of those fiber optic jobbies. It looks pretty ok...

You can kind of see our little one here. We bought it at Dick Smith's Electronics for seven dollars.

Here's the big one. It's artificial. We bought it at a store called "The Reject Shop" for twelve dollars. All the decorations were only seven or eight bucks. That's a pretty good deal. It actually looks descent.

We didn't bring our stockings from home, but we found a couple pretty cool ones here. They'll look much better once they're stuffed with chocolate!

Only twelve more days. That's absolutely insane! I hope you're all ready.

Ryan

Hand Sanitizer, Anyone?

Well, everyone - this is my first posting. I'm kind of new at it, so this may be a bit rough. It has finally sunk in that we're in Australia! The other day we visited Featherdale Wildlife Park in Blacktown (another suburb of Sydney) and we actually saw kangaroos, koala bears, dingoes and a four and a half metre long crocodile (which kind of brought back sad Crocodile Hunter memories...). The cool thing about the park is that you actually get to pet the animals. So for many of you - here are the pictures that you've been waiting for - us with a real kangaroo and a real koala...





We hope you enjoy! (and enjoy so much that you come and visit) We love you and miss you all!

your pal,
amy t.

Red Carpet

G'day mates! How's everything going? Things are going good here. It seems a bit weird right now though because just about everyone that is going home for Christmas has gone. There's lots of empty apartments.

This past week we had a graduation dinner and the graduation ceremony. It was a really good time. For the dinner they rolled out the red carpet and gave all the students and staff and unbelievable meal. Apparently it was over ninety dollars per person. It was so good, but I'm not sure I'd ever pay ninety bucks for any meal.

Everyone looked really great, especially my wife! Here's a picture...

Everyone have an awesome weekend! Make sure you get your Christmas shopping done. I'm off to the mall right now to do mine. Wish me luck.

Ryan

Aidan

Hey everybody. How are you all doing? I can't believe it's December already. It's getting so close to Christmas, but it just doesn't feel like it here. Just the other day the temperature went above 40 degrees celcius. We'll be decorating soon, so I'm pretty sure no matter what the temperature is it will feel like Christmas, we'll make it feel like Christmas.

Anyway, it's December fifth today. That's Aidan's birthday...

Aidan turns two years old today. He's such a great kid. We miss him like crazy and really wish we could be there to eat cake and drink Pepsi and watch him open his presents. If things work out maybe we can be there next year.

Ryan

PS - It was four months ago today that Amy and I got married. Four months! It's been a blast so far, and I'm expecting that to continue. She's a great wife!