She Painted Pictures

Ten days isn't long. Santa Claus is close enough to breath his nauseatingly sweet breath on you. Yet in Sydney, we have very few reminders that so soon it will be upon us. From the skies fall no snow, the smell of pine is difficult to come by, as are acorns. You will be very hard pressed to find a squirrel, which don't even appear in our zoos, let alone our backyards. We spend as little time in the kitchen as possible in the heat and so we eat no roasts and sit by no raging fires. In Sydney, Christmas is a searing hot affair where one gets very drunk on very cold beer and eats as much barbecued seafood and cheese as their stomachs will allow. It's not very traditional and, unless you're a regular at shopping centres or enjoy browsing the tinsel-stocked aisles at your local Supermarket, it's very easy to forget about entirely.

To help remind the English born-and-bred Bobby that, yes, it is indeed Christmas, I made him an Advent calendar way back in the dawn of December. Not the flimsy cardboard and chocolate kind, but more of a-little-bit-of-Christmas-every-day kinda thing. While I would love to spill to you all twenty-four gifts, this would be not only a killjoy for the man in question, but a lot of them are, I suspect, quite uninteresting to those that haven't been a fly on the wall for the entirety of our relationship.

For one of the days this month, however, I'm sharing. The stocking baring the number 10 held a small chatterbox which when played, revealed an invitation to a play date. The type of play date you'd set up for your little brother and BFF's little sister so you could drink long blacks and smoke menthol cigarettes without your parents' scolding you as the kiddies jumped around on play equipment and you felt guilty about giving your little brother second hand smoke, only a much, much better kind of date. We (to Bobby's relief) avoided the play equipment and (to my relief) the menthol cigarettes. Instead, we spent the afternoon plaster painting amongst a jumble of children.

We visited the store at Fox Studios where you can choose the victim of your paintbrush from all kinds of Batmen, skulls, Darth Vadars, dinosaurs and motorcycle piggy banks. They're open on Weekends and Wednesdays. Once you have your plaster, a lady will give you water and paint and all those things you need to bring your plaster alive. If you're the uncreative type, you can buy one of the pre painted ones, but with four year olds to either side, there isn't that much to fear in way of going outside the lines. The lady offers regular words of encouragement and, once you're all done, you can even have glitter if that's the kind of thing you think you might be into. And if you are inclined to do a bit of that play equipment stuff, it's right there too. Showing you what we plaster painted would be equivalent to exposing all twenty-four presents, but I can reveal that it was beautiful. The lady giving out the paint said so.

Beret: Salvation Army (Charity store)
Scarf: Traded for a beer
Bag: $3 from Anglicare (Charity store)
Jumper: Borrowed from a friend
Pants: Hand me downs from Mum
Shoes: Cream (Local vintage store)
Cigarette: Virginia Green rolled tobacco