Tommy Collison

Well, Christmas is over. The next big thing we have to look forward to is the coming of the New Year. I think the days between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day perhaps my favourite days all year. No one is working, in fact, no one is doing anything at all really. I think it’s the one big advantage that Christmas holidays have over a summer holidays are any other holidays. And so we have a pretty laid-back lifestyle over these couple of days – seemingly endless games of Hearts (try not to let Mum shoot the moon…again) or scrabble succeeded by intense bouts of endurance reading. Yesterday, we went karting, and today we have some relatives visiting. The former was actually a bit out of place in this lethargic, easy-going lifestyle.

I think that this is why I enjoy Christmas. Being quite nonreligious, I instead enjoy the byproducts of the holiday season – the food, spending time with your family (everyone comes home for Christmas), the time off school. I’m not a Grinch, I don’t hate Christmas. What you believe is between you when your God, and being honest, it’s not so much that I’m a very tolerant, respectful person, it’s just that I don’t really give a huge amount of thought to what others believe.

Photo owned by rinkjustice (cc)

Patrick got the board game Diplomacy for Christmas, and we tried to play a game of this after Christmas dinner. Oh, and who would have thought that playing as 1910 countries could be so fun! I was France, and I attempted to make a crafty alliance with Mom, Britain to double-cross Dad, Germany, and steal his land. Meanwhile we had Patrick, Russia, coming down through Scandinavia to mount a northern attack on Germany. Finally, John went off and did his own thing, as Austro-Hungary, and captured the countries around the Black Sea. I feel sorry for the poor Yugoslavians…

However, in the end, negotiations broke down between countries and we all went off and played Hearts.

That’s totally how happened in 1910, right?