Christmas in Jersey went well, I thought. We flew out of Doncaster airport, which is about an hour away from Sheffield when you take the train and then a bus. I think it is less than 30 minutes by car. We left Thursday night, and arrived about 30 minutes early to Jersey. For those who don't know, Jersey is part of the channel islands, a group of islands south of Britain and off the coast of France. Jersey has its own independent government, money, and tax system, but it is part of the British crown. Victoria's parents were scheduled to arrive much earlier in the morning, but their flight ended up being delayed about 7 hours due to technical difficulties, so they actually arrived after us. The Jersey airport is quite small, and we ended up waiting about 45 minutes for our luggage to come out. I don't know what happened though, because another plane that landed 15 minutes after us got their luggage way before we did. Victoria's eldest sister Fiona came to pick us up at the airport. She got to play airport shuttle three times in two days. Luckily, they are only 20 minutes from the airport.

On the Friday the men decided to go play golf. I was the only one who had never played before. The course was only nine holes long, but it was in a really nice spot on a cliff overlooking the beach, and next to the airport. I did okay, getting some really high scores on many holes, but playing two pretty well. My biggest problem was relaxing. I always hit the ball better when I didn't try as hard, but I kept tensing up and trying too hard. After golf, we went to a bowling alley to play a round of bowling. Richard, Victoria's brother arrived during the day, so David, Fiona's husband, went to go pick him up so he wouldn't be stuck as the lone male. We finished off our triathalon of modern recreation with a short game of pool. David ended up winning all three games we played, which led to a challenge to a game of darts by other people eager to beat him in something. They had a dart board at the house, so they played when we got back. I'm horrible at darts, so I didn't even bother. I think David won again in the end.

Saturday (Christmas Eve), Victoria and I went into St. Helier, the only city on the island. We bought some stocking stuffers for Gillian, the middle sister, because Victoria had found out she wanted a stocking but Nigel hadn't gotten her anything. When we got home I prepared sauce for lasagna for dinner that night. I volunteered to cook on Christmas Eve since Fiona was cooking all of the food for Christmas Day. In my family it is traditional to eat the big meal with turkey, etc. on Christmas Eve. In Britain everyone eats the big meal on Christmas Day. So we ended up having lasagna on Christmas Eve. Before dinner we went out to a barn that was holding a special Christmas service. They reenacted the story of the birth of Jesus, including actors in costumes and live animals. It was their first year doing it and it proved immensely popular (more so than they expected, I think). I guessed about 400 people were in the barn, and the parking was overflowing. After dinner, I talked to my family on the phone, as they were going to have a big meal that evening so everyone was gathered together in one place.

On Christmas Day I was woken very early by Victoria's three nieces, Hannah, Sienna, and Isobel. They were very excited about opening their stockings. Isobel got a bit carried away and started opening all of Gillian's stocking as well. She's a cute enough little girl that she can get away with that though. Victoria and I decided to open our stockings a bit later, as most of the presents we got each other were in the stockings. Since we didn't have "official" Christmas stockings, we used regular socks instead. I think the normal thing in my family might be to open all of the presents at one time. Victoria's family did it slowly: throughout the day there would be another spurt of present opening. The adults had all decided to just buy for one other adult to avoid shopping overload. I got David a webcam, and he got me a bathrobe. I also got a small globe puzzle from the girls that has me beat already. Victoria's biggest present for me was a cell phone, so now I can fit in with all the Brits.

Around 2 or so we had a huge Christmas meal, which was delicious. They bought a really nice local free-range turkey that tasted wonderful. There were a lot of parts of the meal that were new to me. For instance, they cooked sausages and bacon with the turkey. There were three different kinds of stuffing, two kinds of cranberry sauce, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts (a Christmas tradition apparently), carrots, bread sauce (sort of a creamy sauce with bread in it), roast potatoes, mashed potatoes, gravy, parsnips, peas, and yorkshire puddings (pot-shaped bread things). So as you can see there was a lot of variety!

With the dinner we shot off champagne poppers, and opened two different types of Christmas crackers, which are wrapped mini-presents, that make a bang when you open them. One of the sets of Christmas crackers contained musical whistles. We had eight different whistles, each of which played a different sound. David was most successful in leading us as a conductor. We played several different Christmas songs with a variable amount of success.

After dinner I installed the webcam on David and Fiona's computer and talked to my dad. It turned out everyone else had already gone to see a movie. We set a time to chat longer the next evening though.

We had a huge amount of dessert on Christmas as well. There was traditional Christmas pudding, which is a dark pudding with dates, figs, etc. There was also a chocolate log, and a christmas cake, which was a bit like iced fruitcake. I think there was tiramisu as well.

Monday was Boxing Day, and we did the traditional British thing of going to a pantomime. When I heard we were going to a pantomime for two hours, I imagined it might be very dull after awhile, watching mimes act out Snow White and the 7 Dwarves. As it turned out, the British use of the word "pantomime" does not refer to miming. It is basically a Christmas farce, where normally the main male character is a woman, and there is a large female clown (who is actually a man) called the dame. I gather there is normally another joker male clown as well. The pantomime is full of audience participation. For instance, when Snow White was about to eat the apple, she asked if we thought it was okay, so everyone yelled "No!". Of course she ate it anyway, being a stupid girl. The pantomime is entertaining for the kids, but it also contained some fairly raunchy jokes for the adults. They were generally jokes that kids wouldn't understand, or a rhyme where the last word is left unsaid, leaving the adults to know what would go there. After the pantomime we went home and I did the webcam for a bit. Everyone stuck their head in to see how it worked. I think it was the first time that Victoria's parents and mine have met, albeit virtually. After the webcam all the adults played Scattergories, which was a source of much amusement.

Tuesday we managed to get in another quick 9 holes of golf before Nigel and Gillian had to leave from the airport. After lunch we went into town to look at the post-Christmas sales. Jersey doesn't have sales tax, so the prices in the chain stores were lower than in Britain. I thought about buying some DVDs, but the line was about 50 people long at the store, so I decided not to. I tried to buy some stamps for my dad, but the lone stamp store was closed until after New Year's. In the end I didn't buy anything. I also made dinner on Tuesday night. I made a mexican chicken casserole. However, since Victoria's father, Alan, has trouble with spicy foods, I left out most of the mexican-ness of it.

Wednesday we went to the Jersey zoo and saw all of the gibbons, chimps, and lemurs again. They were mostly hiding indoors this time as a result of the colder weather. After the zoo we went to the Jersey Goldsmith to sort out some jewelry. Victoria and Gillian were given silver charm bracelets by their grandmother when they were younger. They were overloaded with charms though, so Victoria chose the ones she wanted and gave the rest to her nieces. The jeweler cleaned the old bracelets and made new ones for the girls. Now it looks much better. While others were taking care of the bracelet, I asked one of the sales people lots of questions about diamonds. It was very interesting, because they had uncut diamonds for you to look at as well. They also had some movies props there, including the hand from Terminator 2, and one of James Bond's sports cars. There was also a glass box containing gold bars built into a house for a tarantula. It was sort of a strange assortment of stuff for the store (which was very large).

Thursday we saw Victoria's parents off at the airport and then had our own flight later that night. The last train left at 11:30, which would've meant waiting about an hour at the cold train station in Doncaster. We ended up talking to another guy who wanted the train and we agreed to split a taxi three ways. It was about 10 pounds each, so that wasn't too bad. We got home before the train would've even left Doncaster.

All in all, Christmas was a lot of fun and generally relaxing. The food was delicious as well, because Fiona and Joyce, Victoria's mom, are both great cooks.

We arrived home to a second Christmas, with a leather pig we got from Paul and Keiko, and a whole box of presents from the states. Thanks everyone!