Happy Christmas!

In the interests of saving on environmental waste (honest) there’ll be no Christmas cards from us this year – so we wish you all a wonderful Christmas and New Year!

Photo: Sri Lankan Santa giving out sweets at our office Christmas party.

Despite our desperate attempts to make ourselves feel like it’s Christmas here in the tropics (putting up a cheap fake Christmas Tree, playing the usual Christmas CDs, and purchasing Galle’s only Turkey) it still feels more like July.








On Christmas day we will go to our local Methodist Church, which we're now attending regularly, shown in this photo.

We'll then eat and party with 30+ people, mostly other foreigners like us, round at our friends’ house. The meal will include chicken curry, rice, daal, and stir fried veg, with Turkey, stuffing, gravy, and roast potatoes contributed by us! Oh, and the Christmas pud our friend Trudi has brought over.

It may feel more Christmassy on the day than usual in the end, as Mike, Trudi and another chap, have been press-ganged into setting up a band and leading us in carol singing. Another couple are organizing the kids to do some sort of alternative nativity play. I want Joe to be a sheep – sooo cute – he can even Baa, but he may be too hot in a sheep costume even if I could make one by then, so perhaps he should play a shepherd … or come to think of it, maybe he could just be . . . Joseph!?!



We are enjoying Trudi’s company and are looking forward to celebrating Christmas with her. We are discovering a few more local tourist sites, like tea plantations and temples within close reach.

Trudi is travelling round the country at the moment and will join us again for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, before flying out to India, then returning for a couple of weeks volunteering with a charity in Galle.


We the Boxing Day Tsunami anniversary at the forefront of our minds at the moment. Mike's employer is working flat out to get the maximum number of people re-housed prior to the anniversary. Relatives of local people will travel to Galle and other Tsunami-hit areas for alms-giving ceremonies for the dead. There are a number of memorial services taking place. It is not just those who have lost family that are still suffering. Many people are still not in a home of their own, and many have not managed to rebuild their livelihoods. We hope and pray for this situation to continue to improve with the work of ours and other agencies in 2006.

We had a Galle office Christmas party/ carol concert, which was fund and interesting to see. Everyone was given a present of a packet of jelly mix and pineapple jam!

Poor old Mike was press-ganged into playing the keyboard for the carol singing. He hopes desperately that no-one recorded it.

Mean old Santa made Joseph cry!

Our friend Darshie enjoying looking after Joseph afterwards. Darshie's completely lovely. Joe's usually a bit wary of Sri Lankan women as they all want to touch and hold him wherever we go. More to the point, he's a man's man, and will leap into the arms of any Sri Lankan man at the slightest opportunity, and they're all great with him.

And here's our friend Ahamed, who absolutely loves Joseph to bits. Ahamed helped us find our house, and will do anything for us. He has bought Joseph a neck-chain with a pendant with his "birthstone" in it, for Christmas.

Here's a photo of an interesting custom . . . a party to celebrate a young girls "coming of age". I'll leave you to work out the biological reason for the party. Suffice to say we can't imagine any UK girls enjoying such a public announcement . . .

We’ve included a few pictures of Galle town here so you can see where we shop . . . Not quite the Trafford Centre.

And here's a photo of the original Sri Lankan Tea Company's warehouse (an off-shoot of the original East India Tea Company) , which is now a museum of fishing. It shows great things the whole world should know about fish including a tin of pilchards and a jar of fish paste.