As I continue my efforts to be festive about Christmas (I even made short bread today), I have decided to give my friends something other than a rude tee-towel or small useless dish. Or, as is more common these days, No Thing. Yep, I have decided to make them something, because everyone says home made presents are the best.
And it’s more than just manufacturing Christmas cheer. This year, for me, has been the Year Of The Friend. As it draws to a close I can’t help but get all reflective and sentimental about the people who are My Dear Friends.
It’s pretty easy to take them for granted because they are always there like the couch or the kitchen table. And when I think about it, there are a few similarities between my friends, the couch and the kitchen table – getting together, comfort, great food, chat, a few drinkies…thankfully though my friends are not made of timber and feathers and cloth and foam. They are real life flesh and bone people and sometimes their existence leaves me feeling breathlessly lucky.
The year didn’t start on a wonderful note, with things around my community being eaten up by bush fire in early Jan. I was OVERWHELMED by the response to the catastrophe by my friends, from expressing relief that we were safe and sending thoughts, kisses and hugs and offers of places to stay to enormous efforts to find immediate needs for those in my community who had lost their homes and helping get our school back on its feet. That was the start of The Year of the Friend.
It grew from there really. I grew closer to the friends I already had in the community too, and met some new ones – something about a disaster will do that. Then we had a dear friend’s wonderful wedding (and her hen’s day where we all went to MONA and trooped in and out of the loo where you can look at your own vagina while it does wees – hysterical and bewildering and enlightening all at once). Then another few friends having babies and getting pregnant, me getting older and feeling generally more sentimental about everything from orangutans to raspberry cordial and wanting to have fun while I still can. And a blissful weekend away with the girls complete with magazines and gossip and gourmet food and ugg-boots, no kids and a good old fashioned womanly debrief.
All of it has lead to me just wanting to pay tribute to my friends and how lovely I think they are. And I felt a song coming on. It was going to be a poem but then I felt all gooey and singy over it, so now it’s a (roughly hewn together) song. Just to sneak one out (as my 4 year old says about her silent farts) before the year is out. The Year of the Friend.
Merry Christmas. With love. xxxxx
Categories: Navelgazery, SongStressing
Tags: Christmas, friends, friendship, megoracle song, the friend song
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