It’s Christmas in Whangarei! The marina where we are staying is hosting a Christmas decorating contest and we just had to enter! They had about 8 prizes ranging from Best overall to best small display, best local display, best international display and best display on the poles.
For the first time ever, we decorate the outside of Sugar Shack. Matt rigs a special platform for the light’s solar panels and hoists four 39 meter strands of light up the mast! It is a gorgeous display at night, but unfortunately the bright lights on shore temper the colors.
Since, there was a competition, I took most of my holiday décor and put it in the cockpit. I borrowed some garland and small Christmas pieces from the marina and gussied it all up. I had two trees. One tree was positioned on our electrical post and one in the cockpit. Both lit up at night.
Cookie Baking Day
I spent 5 days baking hundreds of cookies. I made gingerbread, white mice (Mexican sugar cookies), sugar cookies, chocolate candy canes with white chocolate frosting and peppermint shavings, and toffee.
Judges and Awards
The judges came by a week before Christmas. I was not past bribing them so I fed them homemade cookies and freshly chilled and spiced eggnog! The judges are Kara (green shirt), the mayor of Whangarei (vest), couple with the bell and santa. We invited a few friends over to be our supportive elves.
We won a few prizes right on the spot. Matt won a lovely Christmas apron and a beer belt and I got a beautiful pair of gloves with a fake ring and fur.
The awards were given a few nights later and guess what? We won 2 prizes. We won “Best overall” and Residence Choice. This is what the judge said as she awarded our prize “”So the winner of this category not only start bribing us with cookies from November, they tinselled, they lit up, they dress up’d, they made Eggnog, they Baked even more cookie and got fully into the xmas spirit. Congrats to Christine and Matt from Sugar shack!” We won a $20 bag of coins (for laundry and showers) and a $100 gift certificate! Yeah
Christmas Eve on Sugar Shack
Sixteen of our cruiser friends were invited over for a Christmas Eve dinner. We provided the pork tenderloin, eggnog, jello shots, white elephant, and christmas cookies. Everyone else were asked to bring a special dish from their home country since we had Germans, Swiss, Lithuanian, and Swiss.
What a truly blessed day we had! We started out with a traditional game of White Elephant where everyone was way too polite for my taste.
We quickly moved on to the eggnog and jello shots which livened up the game 😊
Santa even came and filled everyone’s stockings while everyone was enjoying the merriment (top left corner) and the goodies are shown in the bottom center photo).
It was an amazing way to celebrate Christmas with good friends, tasty food and lots of merriment.
Events from this blog took place on 24 December 2022. Did you read about our Dutch Sinterklaas celebration in our last blog?