Christmas Times - fun things with fun people!

Hello All - I hope you had a fun Christmas time, if you celebrate it, if not I hope you had a great weekend.

I've had a great Christmas day and Christmas time in general, so rather than just do a Christmas day post I thought I'd roll all of the Christmas adventures over the past few weeks into one blog post.

I caught up with Ria after she'd finished some big projects and we had dinner, ice cream and took selfie's by the city Christmas tree.

We went home the weekend before Christmas to have an early Christmas with my family, and I bought my nephew that "when I grow up I want to be a zombie" t-shirt, because I'm an awesome auntie. He actually DOES like zombies,  its not just because I like zombies. 

We also got to see Sultan and feed him carrots - I kind of love this photo as you can see the mountain between his ears!

We also visited Naumai Park before, where I had strangely never been! It was a really lovely spot.

I decided to finish up work early this year (my final day was the Wednesday before Christmas) and I spent Thursday afternoon hanging out with Ria - having lunch, sewing and exchanging gifts. She really spoiled me! I'm lucky to have such a thoughtful friend. 

She gave me a candle, some homemade passion fruit curd and toasted coconut, but the best thing of all was this portrait!

That's right! She painted me a portrait of Mia!! I was so excited - as you can see!

 I also bought her some treasures, I really had in mind something rad I wanted to make her but life was so hectic in the weeks leading up to Christmas and it didn't happen.

I also started sewing some fun Christmas stockings whilst I was at Ria's as this year Rich and I decided we would fill a Christmas stocking for each other.

Christmas day itself was pretty quiet around here, which was nice, Rich made pancakes for breakfast and we got to see what was in our stockings!

I will probably do a couple of extra posts about all of my Christmas sewing, but until then, I thought I'd share a photo of the stockings I made for us - no prizes for guessing which one belongs to me!

These are the goodies I received from Rich! A pin, patch, squirrel notebook and some hazelnut treats.

I also made Mia a wee bow tie for Christmas, she wasn't very impressed with the bow tie but I did manage to get one cute picture!

We went for a big walk on Christmas day, to the summit of Mount Victoria and along Oriental Parade.

I  also managed to finish up a new dress to wear to Christmas dinner on Christmas day! I will do a separate post about the dress soon as I need to take a few more photos!

Our friends kindly invited us to their place for Christmas dinner and we had a delicious meal and decorated cookies!

We also  got to hang out with some feathered friends, as our friends live near the Zealandia Sanctuary, this guy is a kaka which is a native New Zealand parrot.

Finally we opened the Christmas cracker that my Mum gave Mia, I promise she did play with the ball for a bit - even if she looks super GRUMPY in the last photo!

Favourite Wellington Walks: Bolton Street Cemetary

If you've been following my blog for a while you will know that as well as crafts, creepy things and Hello Kitty I really like walking. I live in the inner city and its my everyday mode of transport and I wouldn't have it any other way.

One of my favourite places to walk, when I'm not walking to or from the shops or work is the Wellington Botanical Gardens and one of my favourite places in the gardens is the Bolton Street Cemetery.

I really like cemeteries, because I really like history because I'm nerdy (I have a BA in history and politics - because I'm THAT cool).

At the entrance of the cemetery is a memorial/gave to Richard Seddon (or as he was known "King Dick"), he was and still is the longest serving Prime Minister of New Zealand (although he wasn't officially a Prime Minister until 1901, before that we had a Premier).

King Dick's gave is the most impressive in the cemetery, although there are also quite a few other incredible gravestones.

 Harry Holland is another fairly important person in New Zealand Politics, he was the second leader of the New Zealand Labour party - the inscription reads "He devoted his life to free the world from unhappiness, tyranny and oppression".

The cemetery looks out over Thorndon, one of the older suburbs in the city - which I guess is ironic in a way as many of the early settlers (and Maori who lived in Wellington around this time)  are buried in the cemetery.

Another important figure in New Zealand history Samuel Parnell, his grave stone may be less impressive - but I'm pretty thankful for this guy - like it says below "father of the eight hour day". Thank you Mr Parnell.

It may be a bit weird, or a bit creepy - or both weird and creepy....but I really love some of the elaborate headstones in this place. This one with the love hearts and tiles really appeals to me for some reason.

The cemetery has lots of different paths, some are a lot clear than others. Although we have lived here for over ten years now (yikes) we only recently explored a "new to us" path.

 If you're thinking right now, those headstones are awfully close to those trees, that's pretty weird there is a good and pretty sad reason for that - in the 1970's the cemetery found itself in the way of a new motorway and the motorway won. Many of the graves from the original cemetery were dug up and the bodies were put in one big plot. The head stones wouldn't all fit around this one plot so they have been placed in various spots of the remaining cemetery. The whole thing make me incredibly sad if I think about it too much - the same thing would never happen today, but its pretty horrible nonetheless. 

 

At the end of the path there is an area with a bunch more head stones - including this one, with its fancy tiling.

This area also had a view of the city, the tall buildings you can see are mostly government offices, hotels or apartments.

I will finish off with a few more random photos I took on the day of this walk - doe you have any favourite walking spots?