Christmas Day started about 9am when we headed downstairs to watch Jane, Steve and Marc (Steve's brother) open their presents. From there, we headed to Steve's sister's house, Carolyn, to see his niece, Sarah - almost 5, and watch her open her presents. I'm really glad we tagged along for this, although it felt a bit weird for the first 5 minutes, as Christmas really is for the kids, so it was nice to be around one on Christmas Day. Carolyn and Rob made us feel very welcome.

At 11am, Jane headed off to work in A&E at the hospital, and Marc headed off to drop his girlfriend, Tina, at Heathrow Airport, leaving Steve, Aaron and I to have a very relaxed day pottering around and getting Christmas Dinner ready for 5pm.

While we were getting everything ready - it started snowing. For months now, I've been saying that if I can't have my warm, sunny Christmas, then it had better snow to compensate and my wish came true with snow at about 1pm, then again about 4ish (while I was our walking Cody, the dog).

There were 8 of us for Dinner (Left to Right: Jane, Aaron, Carmen, Marc, Rodger, Jeremy (in the high chair) and Ester) and about enough food for 20! It was one huge bird.

After dinner, we sat down and played the game that Steve and Jane had given us for Christmas. It's called Dirty Minds, and basically you get given 'dirty' clues and have to guess the 'clean' answer - a real laugh after a few wines.

Boxing Day started early (about 7am) for the boys, who were off to play golf in the ice and snow. 9 holes, 10 frozen toes, 1 lost golf club and too-many-swings-to-count later, they were home and we were off to the pub for the afternoon (a british tradition on boxing day). Aaron and Gaz came joint 2nd to last, while the others we knew didn't do much better, but they did all get a prize and I think the overall verdict was good.

New Zealand flag, scarf and All Blacks jersey in hand we headed to Cardiff to watch Wales get cruched by the New Zealand All Blacks (at Rugby Union - For those who don't know what sport the ABs play). We caught a £1 bus after work which took us from London Victoria and dropped us off in the heart of Cardiff about 4 hours later.

We stayed with Steve and his girlfriend Jane. Steve is a good mate of mine from high school in Bangkok, Thailand. He is living about half an hour out of Cardiff so it was easy for us to get to the game. Steve's place is nice and relaxing, as we had nothing to worry about and nothing to do. So I am looking forward to going back for Christmas. It was really good to catch up on old times, seemed especially good for me as I didn't seem to remember half the stories he was telling.

Saturday morning we headed into Cardiff, initially Carmen and I were going to do some sightseeing and the normal tourist things such as go through Cardiff castle, but the weather was that bitterly cold, we deicided to join Steve, Jane and Steve's friend Gareth at the movies, we went and saw The Incredibles. It was a bit of a laugh. When that finished we headed around the corner and went into the stadium.

After a bit of fluffing about, the national anthems started. None of the crowd sing out anthem as no one knows the Maori words (very embarrassing), then the Welsh belt out their anthem and then the game began. We couldnt see the score board and tried to keep track of the score, but by the end we had lost the plot and didn't really know with any confidence who had won. Few moments later we were flooded with relief to learn we had won by 1 point. Few drinks around town, some chinese take-away and back home to crash.

The next day Steve and Gareth took us around the main highlights of the surround areas, it was very cold and a tad misty/rainy so we stayed in the car and did our sightseeing from there. We are starting to think that travelling is a thing best done in the summer. He took around some old Welsh castles, up some hills for some nice views and around the coast. It was a good whirl wind tour.

We ended up at the pub having some local brews and some homemade pies before jumping back on our train back to London. Good weekend, and we are looking forward to heading back for Christmas.