Merry Christmas to everyone.
Christmas Eve here has been a wonderful family and community day. It starts with a visit to our wood fired organic bakery at the ecovillage. They make a special cherry chocolate sourdough – mmmmm. I also picked up a loaf each of the pumpkin and olive and feta sourdoughs to go with the soup and cheeses tonight – a very simple but delicious and healthy family dinner.
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| At the Crystal Waters bakery this morning collecting our delicious organic sourdough bread and catching up with friends. |
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| Crystal Waters Bakery – special Christmas loaf. We shared this with visitors who came to visit today. |
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| The bakery cafe and produce swap |
The bakery usually opens every Saturday and the community gets together for a cuppa and chat – a very important part of our community glue. It was a special opening day today for the Christmas bake. An informal produce swap was happening too.
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Maia at the bakery. Tthe baker, Les, has taught her and Hugh how to make his bread and gave them some starter culture. Their own bread is spectacular too.
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| The grape vines covering the bakery trellis are just laden and create such a beautiful entrance to the space. |
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The children have been so excited today. To help them calm down while they waited for Nanna and the Aunties to arrive, they helped decorate the house, set the table and clean up. I am so impressed with how they all pitched in. Even Monty didn’t undo too many things!
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| One of Hugh’s favourite housekeeping jobs is vacuuming. |
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| Maia loves setting the table and creating floral centrepieces, place names |
Hugh put together his Gingerbread House. This is a project that he particularly wanted to do so I supported him in his making, but let him be creative with it. After a little cross bracing and redesign of roof angle, it held together nicely. This is really the only part of our christmas fare that is so sugar-laden.
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| Hugh worked out the panel sizes and how it was all going to fit together. The sheer weight of the roof he made ended up collapsing the structure – a flat roof and cross-bracing helped it all come together. |
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| Seven year old Hugh is very proud of his creation – we all can’t wait to Christmas day to try it. |
We had a visit from a lovely couple from South Australia who have set up a local food market and sustainability festival in their community. We shared dreams and ideas for a sustainable future and promised to stay in touch.
I helped Maia create her dinner special and everyone loved it. Her soup flavour was spot on. She took her aunties outside to collect herbs for the herb cheese roll. Needless to say, that was devoured by all
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| Maia organised the menu for the Christmas eve meal. We enjoyed pumpkin soup, olive and fetta sourdough with herb cheese roll. Dessert was freshly baked homemade fruit mince tarts with thick pure Maleny cream. Simple but so delicious. |
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| Monty loved the crowns from Nanna’s bon-bons – he made sure we all wore them. |
Just before they went to bed, the kids wrote their special letters to Santa and the reindeers, and left out some organic carrots, milk and one of our home-made fruit mince tarts.
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| Writing letters to Santa |
Hello from Canada!! I just found your blog from my visit at Down to Earth,, I have enjoyed my visit with you today,, that ginger bread house is a beauty!!
Happy Holidays!
Dear Morag. How wonderful to find out from Rhonda at Down to Earth blog that you have now joined the blogging world. I look forward to following you as we all learn more about your gardening and living sustainably.
I have a lot to thank you for Morag. I had just retired and was looking around for my next step when I came upon one of your workshops at a Brisbane City Council library. You were totally inspirational. As well as being interesting and informative you had also brought along the most amazing array of cuttings to illuminate your talk. I live in an inner city unit with a tiny balcony but, after your workshop, wanted to get my hands down in the dirt and grow my own food so I looked around for a community garden and found Beelarong Community Farm in Morningside. It must be 5 years ago now, it's given me some of the happiest times in my life. I have my allotment there, also work in the community areas, run BCC workshops (would you believe) and every day I am able to eat some food that I have grown myself.
So thank you. I still look forward to catching up with you and your workshops when I can.
HAPPY CHRISTMAS, from Jean.
Your meal look absolutely scrumptious and I love hearing about Crystal Waters. It sounds like a wonderful community filled with caring people and nourishing places…
Dear Jean,
How lovely to hear from you here on my new blog. I am very excited to be starting this writing venture and so thankful to Rhonda for encouraging and mentoring me. Thanks so much for sharing your uplifting story. I am so happy to hear what you have been doing since we first met over at Stones Corner Library – an now you are running your own workshops! Congratulations. I hope to put up a page soon of all the places I will be speaking in the first part of 2016. I look forward to meeting up with you again soon.
Happy Community Gardening and Happy Christmas.
Morag
We enjoyed a lovely Christmas day here at Crystal Waters – the highlights were sharing the simple lunch harvested from the garden and kayaking with the kids on the lake – testing out their new presents from Santa. Happy Christmas
Hi Laurie,
Thanks for visiting my new blog. The kids had as much fun devouring (a little bit of) the gingerbread house as they did making it – and were so proud to share it.
Morag