That Christmas feeling

In SA it was easy to have that non Christmas feeling, I remember when we were kids our parents always took us for a drive through town, down Commissioner street, up Market Street and down Eloff street to see all the decorations.  The streets would light up every night from round the 1st week of December, and then of course there was the Christmas bus, which was a bus that was decorated with all kinds of Christmas stuff and travelled to the various suburbs, you would look in the newspaper to see when it was going to be in your area and all the kids would go along to have a look, sometimes you even got to climb in the bus.

Then the highlight was Joubert park, which was done out with all kinds of Christmas stuff, and that would mean another trip into town to go and walk around the park and look at all the decorations and of course there would be Carol singers as well.  So loads of stuff was going on.   All the shops in town would decorate their windows, and we would go window shopping to look at all the decorations.  And there was Buks who would ride around on his red truck dressed as Santa and throw toys and sweets to all the kids.

But then as we got older a lot of the stuff was done away with, either because things were being stolen or they didn't have enough money to put the lights up or of course to be politically correct and if they had to go all out for a Christian holiday what would they do for all the other religions, so eventually majority of places just stopped.  I don't even think the shops decorate their windows anymore, but it is so long ago that I was there at Christmas I have forgotten, I seem to remember the malls having decorations.

So in Ireland it is so great to see the things I grew up with and let Emily experience them too, and the best thing about Christmas is that it is cold, so you can eat a hot dinner and drink mulled wine and enjoy it.

Emily has had quite an adventurous build up so far and it is still over a week to Christmas, besides doing the Santa train and seeing Santa at Daddy's work, we took her off to Phoenix park on Sunday, to Farmleigh where they were having a Christmas market, Carol singers, Santa, and FREE horse and carriage rides, which we did not get to go on, however we left and went to Milanos on the Quays for lunch and then went to the another Christmas market at the CHQ building.

We also got a geat view of the New Samuel Beckett bridge, which I actually got to drive over on Saturday after picking Em up form a birthday party, but Lisa will tell you it was an illegal left turn onto the bridge at that.

Em got her face painted at Milano's and then got to go on several rides at the market, the place was jam packed but wonderful.  It was a great build up to Christmas, however I am still running out of time, presents to buy, lunch to organise and not planned or done a thing yet.

Anyway here are some of the photos that D and I took on Sunday, I took a special one for Terri, the Dublin sunset with a Guinness tanker.  Oh yes and the 98 Thunder bus was there too.