Imagine posting a letter to Santa and looking down into his workshop below! 

 At least you’d know he got your letter very soon – although reading it may take him a little logner as he gets LOTS of letters every day.

I came across this picture in an email and fell in love with it. It is really a chalk drawing on the footpath – there is no hole in the ground to see Santa, and we all knows Santa lives in the north pole anyway – but I love the thought and the drawing itself is amazing!  

 * I would love to attribute this to the right person but I only know the creator as ‘The Chalk Guy’. If anyone has his name, or a link to his site if he has one, please let me know.

I’ve never spent Christmas Day anywhere but at a relative’s home. I understand that a restaurant appeals to some people, but it has never come up for our family gatherings and I’ve been happy with that.

This year, my in laws are due to host it (it swaps between two houses usually) but for health reasons they are less able to do so. So we were going to host it but we have some space issues (plus quite a few things on our plate) and my partner suggested we hire the local hall instead.

I’m torn between the two options and would love to hear other people’s opinions please…

Home

• convenient & can’t forget anything
• need to do lots of tidying etc
• places for babies to sleep (especially mine!)

Hall

• have to pay to hire it
• have to pack stuff (cutlery, tablecloths, decorations, etc)
• lots of space (indoors and out) & parking
• multiple toilets
• will have to clean everything up that night – including taking rubbish with us
• no dishwasher

Either way, I’ll have to do lots of cooking and kids will need supervision outside.

Has anybody hosted Christmas but in another venue? How did it go?

Christmas is a time of celebrations, family and fun. It’s easy in these times to forget about water and energy conservation, but conserving our resources is a year round activity.

Some easy ways to save energy of the summer holiday period are:

- Use curtains to keep out the sun and a fan to move the air rather than turning on an air conditioner or evaporative cooler
- Serve directly onto plates instead of serving platters so there are fewer dishes to wash
- Have a container ready for plates to be scraped into rather than rinsing them
- Consider dry flower or fruit arrangements instead of filling large vases with water for fresh flowers
- Use wine glass charms or another method to distinguish glasses so people can use the same one instead of washing glasses all day

And it doesn’t have to stop there! You can use alternative wrappings for presents instead of using so much paper, perhaps a nice tea towel, table cloth, hanky or scarf. You could even give some water saving gifts such as a tap timer or an efficient shower head. We have a few more ideas listed in our article on saving water at Christmas, too.

Christmas is only 12 weeks away, so now is the time to sit down and plan out your Christmas and make it practical and environment friendly.

It took a bit of time yesterday to read all the stories again and decide on a winner. Actually, it was two winners as we chose one form November and one from December Each winner recevies one personalised letter from Love Santa for an Australian child they love.

So the November winner is Precious Water for the funny and sweet story of his daughter ‘s fear when he was being Santa.

And the December winner is Donna-Marie for her reminiscences about European-style Christmases as a child in Australia.

Congratulations to both of you and we hope the special little children in your life delight you with many smiles

We all know the 12 Days of Christmas, I was doing a Google search & came across the lyrics to the Aussie 12 Days of Christmas. I thought you might enjoy it