Christmas is 'different' here...Part one in an occasional series.

Hayrides and carols. I could have had a decent guess at what the second part of that was a year ago, but by no means the first. Friday night was my first Christmas hayride. I am so North Carolina right now.

A hayride essentially involved putting on a lot (a lot) of clothes, and climbing up into the back of a dump truck, 12-16 feet up in the air, filled with hay, and riding round town in it, singing carols to invalid members of the church, and then defrosting at Taco Bell thereafter. It was a lot of fun.

We must have had 15-20 kids and teens packed into the back of the truck...the hay bales didn't last long, and soon the back of the truck became more akin to a wrestling arena as...well, teenage boys were teenage boys.

So it was cold, it was high, it was, y'know, sort of dangerous out on the roads in the back of a lorry without anything to hold us in, but a lot of fun. And on saturday we took part in the Washington Christmas parade, which took us around downtown in all of twelve minutes (yeh it's a small town) and that was more normal!