From Sandra Juto's Blog

It’s interesting to look around the web and see all the different Christmas posts. A lot of the blogs I follow are particularly personal (eg. Sweet Fine Day) so I get a real insight (eeh, voyeurism!) into people’s lives. I particularly liked Sandra Juto’s Christmas posts. It was interesting to see her timeline of Christmases past and to see how she could express so much from only a few simple shots.

I’m curious about how people celebrate Christmas around the world. I’ve lived in a few different countries so far but New Zealand and Australia have pretty similar Christmas activities. We have a big (cold) brunch, open our presents, go to the beach/bbq/friends house and generally have fun in the sun – play cricket, drink a beer. In England however, it’s a whole other ball game. Sure, we still eat and drink, but it’s a huge (warm) Northern dinner, full of Yorkshire pudding, gravy and the like. All the drinks are warming, Bailey’s and Rums. Everyone wonders if it will snow and we end up settling down to watch Doctor Who Christmas Day Specials. It’s refreshing to me and also strangely familiar – but that’s probably just nostalgia.

There is a universal joke that no one ever achieves their New Years Resolutions and I can say that 9 out 10 times it’s true for me. I’ve been making the same resolutions for years and every year it becomes some kind of guilty/optimistic vicious cycle in which I promise myself “This year! This year!”…and… nothing happens. I feel bad, amend my resolutions and try, try again, all the while feeling like I’m not going anywhere. However, this year, some things really did get done! Here’s my resolutions from last year…

1. Be more creative. Ok so, I think I’ve done this about 50%. I am counting Tumblr work here because dammit, I spend a lot of time curating that mess, making sure it all sits together nicely, that it has a theme of sorts…honestly! I may “like” everything but I don’t reblog everything. Also, I’ve restarted this blog, done some crafty stuff around the house… er, that counts right?

2. Spend less time on the internet doing nothing. Totally failed on this, though I did quit Facebook! Whoo!

3. Lose weight. The big bad repetitive resolution. Didn’t work. Went on Weight Watchers, gained it all back (I only lost a stone but ehh).

4. Redecorate the house. Didn’t get the whole house done but I definitely got the lounge about 80% down. Also re-organised a lot. And painted. Come on!

5. Travel!..and here it is, my crowning achievement of 2011. Cor Blimey did I travel. Let’s list them shall we – Cumbria, York, Bristol, Bath (x2!), London (London Zine Symposium!), Brighton, Stratford-on-Avon and of course, Rome! (also I totally went to Brussels and Zürich cause airports totally count!).

So all in all, I actually did pretty well. I also got one of my handful of bigass debts paid off (I literally squealed in delight when I did this so that I remembered that “Paying off debts is fun!” ugggh!) and have made big movements as far as getting on top of my money. I’ll say this for my parents, they were right when they said budgeting solves all financial woes. It really does! It’s empowering! Plus, you get to make cute graphs in Excel…ok, just me? I also worked through some serious work issues, celebrated 2 years with my boyfriend, got back into reading in a big way and made brave steps towards physical, mental and financial balance.

It make me feel optimistic that not only can I improve my life and myself in general, but also that the things that I sometimes tell myself are “impossible” are actually not that hard to reach after all. It just takes effort – real effort – and discipline. Hard, boring adult words I know, but sitting here at the end of a really good year feels pretty nice, I promise.

So what are my resolutions for 2012? The usual ones are still there (Fix your teeth! Lose weight! Get healthy! Get new glasses!) but now I feel like I may actually be able to achieve them. I want to get back in touch with my zinester side, my creative inner, the person who felt she could say anything because saying nothing was so much worse… I want to get back into using Flickr, taking photos and documenting my life – I feel like my entire relationship with Matt is going to go by un-documented and we’ll be 60 saying “What did we look like back then?”…Im also determined to get a wardrobe that reflects exactly who I am rather than a bunch of cheap/broken clothes that reflect that I have no clue what’s going on with me…but that’s a whole other blog post.

Links: I was inspired by Woody Guthrie’s resolutions from 1943 so you should definitely go check them out.

I randomly stumbled across this video for Coldplay’s song “Paradise”. Keep watching for the end, it’s actually quite touching.

Just a short post to say Merry Christmas! I know it’s already Christmas where my family is so Merry Christmas you early birds! For those interested this (below) is what our sitting room/lounge looks like tonight; Christmas tree, presents, hand-made gold and red garland and of course, sleeping Kirby cat and My Neighbor Totoro on the television (nice programming Film 4!)

I don’t feel quite Christmas-y yet because my Matt isn’t home yet but only an hour or so and we’ll be snuggled up sipping Baileys. Ho ho ho!

I know I was touring England in late Summer and I totally should have expected it, but boy was I surprised by the amount of places with hanging baskets. These guys were everywhere! The top shot is an amazing pub display (talk about OTT!) I saw in Bath and the bottom is a gorgeous (and huge) basket that was in York. I saw beautiful displays up and down England and they got me buzzing about next spring. Everywhere I went I got inspiration for my own garden which is currently in a sad state of “It’s Winter and I’m DYING!”. Poor garden, soon it will be bearable to go outside again! I’m definitely going to try to get some hanging baskets for next year…or just make sure I triple my cottage flower plantings. When my father was setting up his B&B in NZ I remember insisting he have hanging baskets – they really do make a building stand out.

Links: I particularly liked the veggie garden at Dove Cottage in Cumbria and the front garden of The Henge Shop in Avebury.

Just a note to say if I haven’t posted here on my blog, you can always go see my Tumblr, Therapy. It gets updated much more often, mainly due to the fact that I’m a reblogging whore. I use Tumblr as a creative lookbook so it encompasses everything I’m interested in, be it fashion, movies, literature or general fandom stuff like Doctor Who and Harry Potter.

Check it out here, or follow the link in the side bar.

Sussex really is beautiful. The rolling hills make it seem like some kind of David Hockney landscape come to life. The top shot here is Mum standing on the ruins of a castle that’s…err, completely gone. All that remains is the grassy raised hill and that knockout of a view.

Seeing the Long Man of Wilmington was a real highlight of our trip South this year. We had been having a rough trot of seeing attractions* so when we simply took a left turn, drove up a small country lane and were presented with one of Britain’s most classic sites it was a real delight. Add to that was that it a) didn’t cost anything and b) we were the only ones there made it magic. I still can’t explain the feeling I had when I saw the Long Man. It was something so ancient the air was electric. This was definitely compounded by the fact that the figure is simply there, in the middle of a hillside, no red tape, no big signs, no tacky souvenirs. Long may it stay that way.

*Mainly due to crowds and sometimes very expensive entry prices.

Love this image by Christopher Lance.

If someone says, “Hey, you don’t really need to see the Vatican Museums & Galleries when you’re visiting Rome” you should just go ahead and slap them upside the head for me. They. Are. Epic. A complete must see!

Unfortunately when I went to see them it was on the tail end of a week of “Ooh look, more old stuff” and for my Mum it was on the tail end of three months of travelling and loads of “Ooh look, more old stuff!”. Even with that though, with the conveyor-belt-esque walking through the rooms and the loud nazi-esque attendants “SENOIR, NO PHOTOS!”, and even with the long queues, it’s so worth it.

The rooms are beyond adorned. Mum and I had a running joke that the Italians don’t know when to stop. “Do you think this room is done? Needs more fresco? Yes, that’s what it’s missing… no wait, let’s add some gold trim on that…”. This is especially true of the Vatican. It’s just detail on detail, embellisment on embellishment. We were there for a couple of hours and honestly, it felt like 15 minutes to me. I knew, after about 3 rooms, that I would be coming back to Rome just to go to these Museums in full.