English Christmas

Applied for the HOST program at the beginning of semester, which British family hosting international student for a weekend or during festival season. I got the confirmation of my host early of November. My host is a middle age man staying alone. I was a bit disappointed when I got the host confirmation, because I was expecting my host to be a family or a couple instead of a man staying alone. Anyway, I just went ahead. Nothing could be worse than spending xmas alone at hostel or having xmas dinner with my coursemates who I can always see in Manchester.

At xmas eve, I took the bus from Manchester going to Belpher where my host will pick me up there and go to his house at Amber Valley. The bus service name is “Transpeak”. The reason it got the name is because it travels through the peak district, a beautiful country side with farm lands and of course the hills. My host, Denis met me at the bus station and took me back to his house. It was still too early for dinner and I was treated with tea and toast, typical English afternoon tea. Only then Denis told me that we were going to his brother’s house for xmas dinner with his brother’s family. Oh my god, I only prepared one xmas present for Denis, I didn’t prepare presents for his brother’s family. It would be very embarrassing going to someone’s house for xmas dinner with empty hands. Denis had thought about that already, he had prepared some chocolate for me as presents for his brother’s family. Chocolate is always the best and the worst present. Nobody doesn’t like chocolate, but it means you never putting in effort to get someone present too. Anyway, I was going to have xmas dinner at with a British family with number of members. Wuah, it was wonderful. His brother’s house is at Nottingham, not far from Amber Valley. I was warned by Denis of the presence of dogs in his brother’s house. Well, I still could tolerate it, and I tried to tolerate it. With UK cold weather, it is generally quite ok, everything just doesn’t have very strong smell. However, three dogs wandering around the small living room with people, emm… I could tolerate for one night. There were Denis’s brother Eddy, his wife Karen, Denis’s parents and Eddy’s daughters and their partners. When Denis first talked about Hanna and Holly, he said their partners instead of hushands. I knew they might have special relationships. The truth is, Hanna has married to his hushand Richard and they have a son at age of two. Then Holly and his partner Andy, they are not married, but they have a son at age of three. They live together, raise the child together but they are not registered married couple. Never mind, anything could happen in so called developed country. The xmas dinner started with breaking of a card board candy. The breaking came with a little firecracker when we pulled it at each of the end with the person sitting beside us. There was a paper crown, a key chain and a piece of paper with trivial joke. Everybody wore the paper crown in the dinner. It came the appetiser, a very small cup filled with cooked prawns immersed in lemon juice and vodka. Then the first course was soup. It was very delicious, Karen is really good in cooking. Then it came with the main course. This family doesn’t like turkey, instead Karen cooked beef for the main course. The side dishes were put in big bowls and passed around the table for each one of us to take it into our plates. Very typical western dining style. Two slides of roasted beef, mashed potato, fried potato, vege and a piece of something like toast, didn’t really know what was it. A plateful main course made me very full already. Forgot about the wine. British family treats guest by champagne when the guest first arrives to the house while waiting for the dinner to be served. When the soup and the main course served, red wine and white wine are served as well. By the end of the main course, the family had already taken 1 bottle of champagne and 3 bottles of red and white wine. After the main course, dessert was served. It was tiramisu. The base of the tiramisu was made of sponge cake which fully immersed in pure brandy. Taking that piece of tiramisu was equal to taking one full glass of red wine. I was going to be drunken. While eating dessert, they took the hard liquor glasses out and started drinking brandy. By the end of dessert serving, the table was full of champagne glasses, wine glasses and hard liquor glasses. It was not the ending of dinner yet. A cup of tea or coffee was served. Anyway, it was better than any more alcohol.

By the end of dinner, it was close to 11pm already. Denis had to go to church to play church organ for the xmas eve service. He is not a devoted Christian, he just likes to play organ. I got the chance being to the organ loft where normally people won’t be allowed to go in except the organist. It was the first time I saw the Christian having mass. In my point of view, it is more or less same like the chanting in Buddhist temple. When we got back to Denis’s house, it was 2am already. Before going to bed, we had tea and chatted for a while. British do like tea very much. Denis could drink more than 5 cups of tea everyday. In fact, I didn’t see him drinking plain water other than tea, champagne, wine and brandy.

On the xmas day, both of us woke up by noon time, taken English breakfast as lunch. The typical English breakfast which got sausage, bacon, stir fried mushroom, egg, tomato, toast and of course a cup of tea. We didn’t go out on xmas day, just chatted till evening and went to Holly’s house for dinner. Her house is much smaller than Eddy’s house, but she still got a dog in her house. It was really too crowded to have the dog with so many people in her house. Her dinner was buffet style. Apparently all of the foods were pre-prepared frozen food which she just needed to put them into oven to heat them up and the dinner was ready. Of course it was the only cooking she could do. There were fried chicken nugget, bun with smoked salmon, cheese and tuna toppings. The dinner served together with champagne and wine, as usual. Even Karen admitted that British have been drinking too much. We went back to Denis’s house by 11pm, again had tea and chatted for a while before going to bed.

We woke up earlier on Boxing day. After having breakfast, we went out to some local tourism spots. We went to the Derbyshire henge to see few piece of large limestone put into circle by Bronze Age people. It is at the middle of farm, surrounded by grass field with sheep and cows. Then we went to see the Solomon temple. Small tower built by unknown people very long time ago. It was damn freezing at the top of the tower because of wind blowing. We couldn’t stay long and left very soon. Then we went to Danis’s friend’s house at Nottingham for dinner. Alan treated us with simple dinner of water boiled potato and drilled salmon. Luckily he is not a wine lover, so we didn’t get served by wine. After the dinner we went to theater to see pantomime. It is a theater play but it is not as serious as play like Shakespeare’s script. The title of the pantomime was Cinderella. The script followed the original Cinderella story basic, but it got many humourous scenarios. Luckily I have been watching UK tv for some time. So I could understand the humour which linked to UK current issues and some famous tv programs like strictly come dancing and little Britain. The whole play was so funny and hilarious. The play was slightly more than 2 hours with an interval break in between so that audiences could go to washroom or buy ice-cream. The most delighting thing was the classical theater design with three layers of seats. The design of the theater is just like the theater we see in the movie “Phantom of the Opera”. I have never thought that I would see the theater like this in my life and I was in the theater watching a pantomime. It was a wonderful night.

On the next morning, I and Denis woke up very early because I needed to catch the bus to come back to Manchester. Denis sent me to the bus station and he said to me: Your life will be back to normal again! Yup, my life will be back to normal again once I get back to Manchester. Back to the room I have got very familiar with where I eat, study, watch tv, watch movie, surf internet and chat on msn everyday. The scenery out of the bus travelling back to Manchester was just very nice. Green grass field farm land with sheep and cows. The sheep just looked like a very small white spot from far. As the bus travelling closer to Manchester, the green scenery was gone, I was back to city. It was the most special xmas I ever had which I would remember forever.