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Yikes- nearly three weeks since I have been here...Not good blogging form at all. And now, the silly season is well and truly upon us. Tis the season to be jolly,as the saying goes. Tis also the season to eat and drink excessively, to buy prezzies for people we love and live with, and also for people we have not had too much contact with since, oh around this time last year. We will then collectively put up a  ''Closed'' sign up and down the country until early January sometime.  We will get the Big Day done and dusted for another year, then pack up the car so fully that the headrests are no longer visible, and we will head  off to the beach/lake/mountains. 

Everywhere everywhere, the newspapers, magazines talk shows, and Google (one million plus entries) are telling us what NOT to do at Christmas. But guess what- those well-meaning types should all save their breath, because we know all that stuff (eat and drink in moderation, monitor your credit card usage, be nice to those rellies that you really cannot stand the sight of, but who you know will turn up empty-handed for lunch at Uncle Dave and Aunty Edna's,  pace yourself, everything in moderation, etc etc). Yes that's right- we have heard it all before. We already know this....But we will choose to ignore it yet again. 

Let's put it down as being yet another quirky and unusual behavior that we as a species engage in,  which is to turn our noses up at good advice (which is but one of the reasons therapists and counselors actually stopped advising people decades ago...). We have learnt nothing from the two thousand plus Christmases that have come so far- we will do what we have always done- and we will do it excessively. 

Summer in our little country so far, is turning out to be a real beauty.  This is great for us all, as we all love the long summer days, and we spend them in the great outdoors (except when we are at the mall, or indoors blogging...). But of course quite a few of us will actually want to go off and drown ourselves over the next few weeks.... But here is something quirky- whilst too many of us will drown over the coming weeks, being fore-armed with advice we will choose to ignore (for a country that is completely surrounded by water, this has apparently not taught us a lot, as we have one of the highest numbers of deaths by drowning for a developed country), the water safety topic is one which some of us actually do slowly pay attention to.  Although our drowning stats per capita remain high, they are slowly coming down. So it seems that sometimes (on those occasions when something greater than our livers or credit ratings are at stake) we do actually listen to advice- as Water Safety NZ  will tell us....

Anyway, back to the Festive Season- have a great Christmas, or what ever it is that you might celebrate at this time of the year. And you know the drill- drink too much, and eat way more than you actually need. I know that I will.  Spend hard, and bicker with those rellies, because you probably won't see them for another year.  Get a few sunburns along the way, if it is currently your summer. Because by mid January we will be back at work, and we will all will need something to complain about to kick the new year off. We will want people to know that the holidays were great, sure, but they were not easy.....