Christmas was the last thing we were expecting - our boreal brains had some difficulty reconciling the month with the weather. But Christmas it was, before we knew it. We were fortunate enough to have been isolated from the consumerist hype that has come to typify Christmas at home: no jingles in shops from September onwards, no television adverts exhorting us to buybuybuy and spendspendspend. Quite a bizarre experience. Beans and weeds don't stop growing for Christmas, even in New Zealand, and work continued as normal until the day before. The day itself was spent in true Kiwi style, namely outdoors and barefoot. By that time four WWOOFers remained at Te Aranga, and with Jim, Julie, Nathaniel, foster son Blair, his wife and two children and neighbours Bernard and Daphne, the thirteen of us (no doubt
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