Part 1 - Christmas with the Saunders

Both Keegan and I really enjoy the Christmas holidays. I love the decorating, baking, silly movies, social get togethers, the family time and the winter wonderland back drop we often have on Christmas day. For as long as I can remember, all of my Calgary family would get together for Christmas. As all of us cousins get older, we don’t see each other that often so Christmas was always a great time to catch up. For both Keegan and I, this is our first Christmas away from home. It's also my first Christmas in summer! Although we are missing our own families this year, we are both feeling very grateful for an invitation out to the Saunder's (Luke’s family) sheep farm for some xmas celebrations.

Now to give you a bit of back story since both Keegan and I have our own weird connection to the Saunder’s family. Mine is pretty straight forward – I use to live with Lana and then eventually with Luke when he moved in. Luke and Lana are now married with a baby and we had an opportunity to meet the Family in Canada when they were out for the wedding and to meet baby Mataya. Keegan’s story is a bit more random, but it turns out that Keegan’s mom’s best bud Cecilia from Vulcan AB has cousins in NZ and Luke’s mom, Gwenda is good friends with these cousins and Cecilia! Its kind of funny to think if Keegan and I hadn’t met before, we both still may have ended up at the Saunder’s farm in NZ one day. Small world!

On the farm, there are 2 houses: Gwenda and Sam’s (parents place) and Benny’s (sister’s place). We stayed over with Benny but had alot of visiting between both houses. Besides thousands of sheep all around, they have a few pets too: Frank, the goat, Roger and Dodger the Alpaca’s and Luigi and Diego, the pet sheep. I got into the Christmas spirit once we arrived and did some Christmas baking, made some eggnog (they don’t have eggnog in NZ), put up xmas lights, cut down and decorated a tree with Benny. We even had a few xmas presents under the tree for us:). Traditions here are very similar to back home and we even had a bit of turkey on Christmas day! We celebrated Christmas with Gwenda’s extended family out on the east coast. Unfortunately it poured rain the whole day so it wasn’t exactly the beach Christmas we were hoping for but it was still great to visit with the new NZ fam. We both really enjoyed farm life and I'd say we are basically sheep farmers now...Les mer