Saturday, 21 December 2013

Cesca Has No Idea: If this Santa still deals with Post Traumatic Stress







Once a year my little town of Gerringong has it’s Christmas Street Parade which is always fabulously hilarious and gives me a swift reminder of how very “small town” we still are. This year, as every year, my favorite exhibit was the awkward teenage footballers pushing the wheelchairs of the very old retirement village residents down the steep slop of our main road. The people who are being pushed don’t look like they quite know where they are and have clearly been draped in costumes against their will. Last year each elderly person had a huge over sized bow strapping them into the chair as they were each a present, the year before that very, very old Marys’ and Joshephs’ holding very lifeless dolls.

Even better this year the sign that preceded the awkward footballers for the Retirement Village as this:


This year one of the vintage cars broke down in the middle of the parade, when eventually they realised this thing was not going to move the awkward footballers came to the rescue and pushed the car all the way up the hill.

Someone who had traveled down from Sydney for the Parade (not entirely sure why) had said what they were amazed at was the lack of road safety and security in comparison to Sydney. They did put up a yellow caution tape along the road (the first time that has ever happened, it is councils way of saying “look, look we tried!”) but there was no security and the trucks were so close to the gutter, that as my mother sat on the gutter to get a good photo of the float across the road we had to swiftly pull her out of the way of the huge decorated fire engine that would have made her part of the slowest hit and run in the world.

But the best part of the Annual Gerringong Street Parade is the year that it started and the story of how Santa arrived. Here is the article from the news paper Christmas 1998, and I want to point out that in the first line it says “Father Christmas plummeting into the trees only added to the excitement of the hugely successful Gerringong Street Parade.” Holy shit that guy could have died!

So basically the big entrance was going to be Santa sky diving into the middle of the park and then greeting the children with lollies, unfortunately Gerringong is well known of its wind, so the wind had changed directions as Santa was gliding down, he got dragged across the park, very narrowly missed some power lines, plummeted down through a huge tree and ended by smashing through the windscreen of an antique car! Then before he could recover hundreds of screaming kids who had been hyped up for the arrival and lollies over the loud speaker ran at him from all angles (rather like at the golf course carols) as this guy is still shaking broken glass off himself and trying to figure out if he has internal bleeding.


 That year I happen to also be featured on the front cover of the newspaper sitting next to my friend Violet, I am the one towards the left who is holding my arm up because waving to my adoring fans is too hard. 
 

So yesterday I sat for many hours of tea at the Deli watching the parade with my old friend Hannah, who I read in my scrapbook from 1998 was one of my new friends for that year. 
Han was worried about how large her delicous pancakes were. (first world problems!)

Thursday, 19 December 2013

Cesca Has No Idea: How people have jobs and do Christmas properly at the same time





So this year Christmas has grabbed me by the heels, strapped me to the back of a slay and dragged me behind for 40 k’s till my body has stopped wriggling, which is my odd way of saying that I have for some reason become very Christmas obsessed this year.

I have a feeling it is a combination of a few factors but mainly when it all comes down to it, it is unemployment and the joy mountains of time brings.

So this year in the spirit of Christmas I have participated in:

  • The Neighbourhood Christmas Party – hosted by my parents, my dad bought me weight watches white wine… message received.
 
  • The Santa Pub Crawl – thousands of people dressed as Santas’ and Christmassy sluts of different varieties, best people watching by far of the year and we were able to meet lots of lovely Santas’ with fraying cheep felt suits and we were accidentally pressed up against their junk under a picnic table umbrella while it poured down rain.

  • The Nolan Christmas Party – my family Christmas party where each year towards the end of the day, when my dad has had time to get seriously drunk, he is made to put on the Santa suit and give all the many, many kids in my family presents. But because he has a ridiculous general knowledge he will give a present to my little cousin Lucy, for example, by saying in a loud slur, “THIS PRESENT is for someone who has a name that is derived from the name of SATAN!” The answer he is looking for is Lucifer but it is hilarious watching their faces.

  • The Carols on the Green – Santa got mobbed on a golf buggy.


  • The Hand Made Night Markets – It happens around Christmas time, there is Christmas stuff, it counts.

 
  • St Mary’s Cathedral Christmas Light Show in Sydney – which was incredible, they had a great choir of men and women who had busy lives so they were called the Overcommitments, (gave me a giggle) and while the lights were being projected on to the cathedral all the kids were running around down the bottom and during the trudging scenes of Joseph and Mary all the kids looked like little ants in the grass.

  • We also have out local Christmas Street Party tomorrow which had the best first year EVER but I will explain another day.

If you have been doing anything Christmassy let me know. This post was really an excuse to get out a bunch of photos I have been sitting on. Oh and by the way it is the start of a heat wave today and I woke up this morning to a cricket ball slamming into the outside of my wall from the kids next door who are newly on holidays playing 7am cricket. Yay school holidays!

Tuesday, 17 December 2013

Cesca Has No Idea - How Santa avoided running over several children in his golf cart




Last night I went with the family to the local carols night at the golf club and it was people watching bliss and pandemonium, it was like watching one of those ant farms that has been cut down the middle so that you can see the inside. Hundreds and hundreds of kids of all ages running around like they had found out it was the end of the world and at the same moment they had been injected with a lethal mixture of lollies, chocolate and red cordial.

There was a free petting zoo and face painting, so these kids who had forgotten they look like batman were holding baby chickens while lamas with bows and Christmas hats on tried to chew on their hair.

Also the sand pit things at the golf course were the hit of the night, kids were going wild in them, running up and down the sides like it was a skate bored ramp, filling their shoes with sand, making sand angels (welcome to Christmas in Australia) and putting sand on the faces of their mothers who would look at them in a serious way like “if you weren’t so damn cute you know I would have drowned you in the bath a long time ago.”
 
Oh and then the best part! They finally got to the stage of the night where the “Special Guest” was about to arrive (I love it when the announce it like that because the older kids who are like 9 years old tell everyone that they know it is Santa because they are older now and can no longer be fooled). From the far back of the golf course Santa is being driven in on a golf buggy and then the first kids see him and start running, and then the other kids see those kids running and it catches their eye and they bolt too and within a minuet hundreds of kids are running like a tsunami is lapping at their heals towards this poor guy. I have no idea how he didn’t even run over one kid that night. 



As we were about to leave the host announced: “And I would like to say thank you to all those parents who helped us out when Santa arrived making it so much safer than last year.” I have no idea what happened the previous year but man do I wish I had been there!

Monday, 16 December 2013

Cesca Has No Idea - What she is doing with her life


My parents backyard the other day...yes that is my cubby house, it is bigger than my apartment.

During my first year of freedom from education I have discovered that being qualified as a teacher and being good with kids does not necessarily add up to enjoying school teaching. I feel discovering this would be ok if it was one of those situations where I was being forced to do teaching at university by oppressive parents or obligation of some kind, but my real passion was taxidermy or base jumping, because then I could discover that primary teaching probably isn’t for me and be inspired to follow my dream of being a professional dead animal stuffer or base jumping teacher.

I unfortunately have no idea what I want to do with my life. I have watched LOTS of TEDtalks this year telling me in incredibly inspiring ways to follow my passion but what if you don’t know what your passion is?

And it is not like I haven’t tried this year! I have volunteered days at many places to see if they are the right thing for me: children’s hospital primary school, environmental education ce
ntre, summer camps, alternative education schools etc. some of them I definitely liked more than others but I am still desperately craving more actual direction and goals than these are offering me right now.

My current plan is to save some more money for the next 5-6 months then go over seas and do some long over due travel for my passion. The plan: 2 weeks road trip around Scotland with one of my best friends Di, then 9 weeks at a Croatian summer camp followed by visited extended family in Italy to maybe teaching English in Spain. But seeing as I constantly change plans…who knows?
I found a friend, an almost frog I named Jim.

Then when I get back in 2015 I will finally buckle and take a full time teaching position where ever the state want to send me and I will finally have money and pay off my car to my poor mother.

I don’t really have any photos I don’t think of my trying and failing to find my passion this year, so I might just put in some photos of me wasting time during bouts of unemployment. (p.s I have dyslexia, enjoy the spelling mistakes)