Our earliest memories of Christmas were of waking up at the crack of dawn, with stomach curling delight at the thought of all those Christmas presents waiting under the tree in their pretty and colourful wrapping papers, seeing our favorite cousins and wonderful food.

This was the morning where family gathered and lingered over Christmas breakfast of warm croissants, pancakes and French Toast slathered with berries and mascarpone after opening presents. The grownups would toast each other with glasses of champagne and start discussing and preparing the Christmas lunch in readiness of the guests.

There would be the phone calls from and to family in overseas countries, and in those days calls overseas were kept to a minimum to keep costs down. There always seemed to be this air of magical mystery involved when calling the family in Austria!

Over the years, our far flung distant family would send beautiful and unique European Christmas decorations to decorate our sweet smelling, pine Christmas Tree. Every year, a huge wooden crate would arrive filled with gifts, sweets and Christmas ornaments nestled in amongst sweet smelling wood shavings.

We loved the excitement and thrill of leaning over and searching through the shavings until our fingers encountered an object, pulling it out and seeing what was inside the wrapping paper…

The rest of the day was spent in a happy blur of playing with new toys, eating food and playing until we were tucked up in bed when our eyes couldn’t stay open any longer!

The memories of those rich days have remained and and one of the most enduring memories is that of our yearly Christmas trees and the fun, anticipation and ritual of Dad going off to get the tree, Mum putting on Christmas music and us kids helping decorate and drape the tree.

These days each of our Christmas ornaments holds a special memory, nostalgic and heartwarming and we often stop and say, remember when Auntie Shirley made the plum pudding and Uncle Bernie swallowed the sixpence? Or when Rocky the Dog jumped up and grabbed the turkey and Mum and Dad raced after him shouting drop it!! There was no turkey that year!

So we decided to celebrate and honour the magic of Christmas each and every day for 365 days of the year because of the happiness, the lift in spirits and pleasure everything about Christmas brings!