Christmas this year was all about initiative and hardcore family tradition.  The boys turned a corner, whereby they transitioned from being passive pawns in our larger plans of "the Christmas experience", to being the driving force and dictators of events.  Christmas this year arrived with a cold snap a few days beforehand, and we found ourselves in the country in minus 15 degrees, with a windchill factor of minus 500.  Or maybe it was 1500.  That night we slept in...

 I had a fond memory of my grandmother today.  Margarita was trained at the Latvian Academy of Art before the war, and when she came to Australia she ended up teaching the Adelaide high society ladies to paint in the 1950s and 60s.  She was an incredibly "modern" person, an eternal optimist, forever interested in things and making new friends.  She also had a charming set of prejudices.  Apart from recoiling from men with beards (Is there a name for beard phobia?  ...just...

In our neck of the woods, you could be forgiven for believing that the end of the world was nigh. It's  4 p.m. and it's just getting dark.  There is a snowstorm outside - it's about minus 5 - so the snow is swirly, powdery and fine.  It's like Mrs God up in the clouds has gone crazy sifting the flour for gingerbread... or something. The lights in our windows are twinkling hopefully, and I can hear the wood pellets jingling as they are fed into our wood furnace.  Fizzy is...

The grade one teacher snuck me this letter Mik wrote to Santa this week.  For those of you who can't read Latvian:  "DEAR SANTA, ONE REAL TICKET TO AUSTRALIA. AND CHOCOLATE. AND ONE REAL KANGAROO.  Merry Christmas, Miku...

Everyone's getting into the Christmas spirit over here.  Even milk at the market is putting on appropriate attire.  By the way, that festive looking bottle up there is actually a silent killer -  RAW MILK.  Shock, horror!  They sell it at all the markets here - and little Latvian children drink it down.  I hear ladies in New York have been rioting because it's against the law to buy raw milk for their offspring.   All the bottles at our local artsy...