365

This is post 365 - a pretty poor showing for a blog that's been around since before I turned 30. Maybe it's a sign that this is not sustainable. I am still pondering my decision. I won't go without saying goodbye though.

This between Christmas and New Year week we are just chilling at home and in the local area, playing silly games and running around with our son, eating chocolate and pizza, reading avidly and sleeping loads. It's the one week of the year when we get to unwind unwind rewind unwind. And so that is what we are doing, earnestly. You?

Memory Box 6: Christmas tree

We are not christian but so many of our friends and neighbours are that we celebrate with enthusiasm. The Fernandes's, the Kurien's, the Coehlo's, the Elley's, the Ghosh's. For many years of my Delhi childhood we go to midnight mass with my parents friends (more for the carols and a chance to stay up till past midnight in the warm company of friends on a cold Delhi winters) , we eat a jolly tasty Christmas day lunch and enjoy 'tasters' of christmas cake for weeks before and after. December is undoubtedly a fun month to be a child.

But of all the Christmas days of fun and food the memory most endearing is my very own Christmas tree. My ingenious mum has taken all the bangles off her wooden bangle stand and decorated it with cut green crepe paper, a star on top and a number of homemade decorations from my childhood and hers. On Christmas morning there is most certainly a present for me next to the tree. The tree is smaller and happily the present usually drwarfs it.

There is a picture of me and my christmas tree languishing somewhere in an album. In it I am around 6 years old and standing next to a wicked Christmas tree with a somewhat toothless grin.

I want to find that picture next time I go home. In the meanwhile, Merry Christmas world.

The Fake Malayali

Ok so I'm not doing a travelogue because this place has been done and done again many times over by people far better equipped and verbose than I. Kerala. Where half my genetic material is from and a place I am sad to have ignored for most of my adult life. So this time we spent a week in Kerala, staying at a very beautiful hotel in Cochin, going to my hometown Palakkad briefly, attending a family wedding, visiting Guruvayoor to pray and offer in weight bananas and sugar equivalent to my beautiful son, spending a day on a houseboat in the stunning backwaters and attending the most beautiful temple festival in my uncle's home.

BTW I hate blogger with an amazing intensity as the bleedin pictures refuse to do as I command. So here are a few pictures from our trip which are all haphazard and incorrectly marked (and for once I am not to blame!)*:















The view from our hotel room in Cochin

'aaati' or 'aaaa' (aana) as my kid says

















the very beautiful Guruvayoor

















the stunning backwaters

the elephants decked in their finery at the temple festival

*(with a rubbish camera, whose lens has seen cleaner and child fingerprint free days)

The Five XII

1. I wish I could say that it's the snow and freezing weather that's kept me from blogging, but really it's just sheer unadulterated laziness.

2. It is freezing though. And all I want for Christmas is to stay in doors and drink mugs of hot chocolate and watch mindless television. Chasing around after our very little person will have be taken in turns with V as I intend to come back to work in 2011 very relaxed and unwound.

3. I've been to India on holiday (one of my many reasons for not blogging is food, rest and laughter induced laziness). I shall not blog lengthily about this but over the break shall endeavour to post some pictures of our lovely break from the routine of work.

4. Here are 3 book recommendations for the holiday season: The Confession by John Grisham (whose last book was a terrible disappointment - this is a return to form); The Help by Kathryn Stockett (absolutely one of my favourite reads of this half of the year); Shadow Princess by Indu Sunderesan (the third in her series about the Mughals, after the Twentieth Wife and Feast of Roses, this book has taken it's time getting here but is absolutely worth the wait - read them in order if you can although it isn't necessary for the continuity of the storyline, just for the timeline of history). Beg/ borrow/ buy them, curl up with a blanket and/ or cup of something and enjoy the mind food.

5. To blog or not to blog, that is the question. In this already overgrown garden of cyberspace I am begining to feel quite weed-like, insignificant and in need of a good pulling out from the soil. I am going to mull this over and make a decision over the next 10 days or so.: to begin again elsewhere or resolve to re-discover my love for blogging my mundane life and what amuses it right here or to just stop completely. In the meanwhile I will blog regularly (everyday? with pictures?) for the next 10 days. I bet you don't trust me. Well, honestly, neither do I.