December 2025 - PLAYWORKEATREPEAT

My 2025 Recap of the Year

Hi friends. I wanted to pop in to say hello, share a quick recap of the year, and wish everyone a wonderful Christmas. Before I do, I need to acknowledge how incredibly sad and shaken we all are after the senseless shooting at Bondi Beach yesterday. I have no words. I know so many of us turned on the TV and watched the breaking news unfold, feeling shocked and heartbroken. My phone started pinging over and over yesterday while I was folding the laundry. When I opened our family group chat, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. A shooting. Here. No way. This doesn’t happen in Australia. We have gun control. We all started checking in to say we were safe, and then my heart dropped when I remembered Sam had left earlier, saying he was heading to the beach. As I tried to text him, my fingers wouldn’t work, and I fumbled around. But he must have seen the messages coming through, too, because his reply popped up almost instantly. He was safe; he’d gone to another beach. Thank God. You know that instant calming relief you feel after panic? That’s what I felt. And then, straight away, I thought about those who weren’t so lucky. Those victims who will never get to send their families that message, I’m safe. So sad. My thoughts are with the victims, their families, and everyone affected by this terror attack. I just hope there isn’t any retaliation and that everyone stays safe. It’s hard to switch from something so awful, but as this will be my last post for the year, I wanted to recap 2025 and share some of the highs as well as the not-so-highs of the year. Thanks so much for being here today. I really appreciate you stopping by. My 2025 Recap of the Year Well, I have to say that 2025 has been my favourite year since 1984. That’s a long time between favourite years, isn’t it? I don’t want to make it sound like nothing good happened in between all of those years. Of course, amazing things did. But 2025 just feels extra special and will always be for me the year I started doing things outside my comfort zone and let myself experience the most amazing adventures. I liked it! So instead of going into every little detail and putting you to sleep, here’s a quick recap of the highlights. The Highs Travel in 2025 I survived a long-haul flight all the way to our epic holiday in North America. Yeah, I don’t love flying, so this was huge! On this trip, all my dreams came true when we visited Disneyland and Universal Studios. We spent a week on a road trip through Arizona, Nevada, and Utah We hiked the freezing cold Narrows in winter. I snorkelled in Hawaii Back home, I braved another plane ride in June and spent a couple of nights in Melbourne with my lovely cousin. Family Highlights Cousin Connect gatherings throughout the year are always the highlight of every month. We had some small birthday celebrations for me, my husband, and both of our sons. I’m a low-key party person when it comes to our family birthdays, but invite me to yours and Party Ruth will pop out, I promise. Home Wins I totally reorganised my office space and made it all cozy. Friends I’m so thankful for the wonderful friends in my life and the fun adventures we got to have during holiday breaks in 2025. Over many years of friendship, they’ve been there through the good, the bad, and the ugly, and I couldn’t ask for better people by my side. The Not-So-Highs Work We can’t have everything, right? Even though 2025 has been my favourite year in almost every way, work has been incredibly challenging. In my 28 years as an educator, I’ve never faced a year like this, and it really tested me. As much as I wish I could share more, I can’t. But if any educators are reading this, I would really like to know. Was it just me, or did you feel the same about this year? I was so tempted to walk away, and I have never even thought that before. Not ever. Sigh. My Blog This year, I stopped posting as frequently as I had in previous years. My husband’s work schedule changed, which meant we could spend more time together in the evenings. He’s always been so supportive of my blog. Haha, he never reads it, but he likes that I have a creative outlet. So I still blogged, but dinners at home or occasionally out, along with time on the couch binge-watching all the shows, became too tempting. I decided to scale back and post three times a week. But as the year went on and work really started to wear me down, my energy disappeared. Writing stopped feeling easy and started feeling hard. I began questioning everything and telling myself my blog was awful. Why was I even writing about my everyday life? Who would want to read this? Where did my energy for sharing about fashion, recipes and home organisation go? That negative thinking took over, and after long days, I was simply too tired to think, let alone write. So I started to disappear from here a little. But it’s the last week of preschool, and from this Friday, I’ll be off work for five glorious weeks. I’m going to take a short break, pull my socks up, and find my mojo again. Before I sign off, I wanted to end on a good note and share this photo. Here I am with a few of the lovely ladies I work with, and I’ve blocked out some of the faces because I didn’t ask permission to post. Not all of my work buddies are in this picture, but if it wasn’t for them, I don’t know how I would have got through this year.

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Christmas in Australia

Every year, when Christmas rolls around, I have the same thought. I really wish I lived in the northern hemisphere. I can’t help feeling a bit of Christmas envy when I picture snow, winter coats, Christmas markets and mugs of hot chocolate with marshmallows. It all looks so cosy, and it just makes sense. It matches the idea of Christmas I have always carried in my head. But I live in Australia, and my Christmas is very different. And even though that winter fantasy never truly goes away, I have realised there are things I do love about the season here. So come with me as I share about some of the things that make Christmas in Australia special to me. And no, it’s not the beach, or swimming, or spending the day at Bondi Beach. Haha, this non-beach lover has other favourites! Christmas in Australia Christmas in the Summer It’s summer over here, yep, we have opposite seasons to most of the world, and I know it blows some people’s minds. While half the globe is bundling up in scarves and coats, we have our air conditioners on full blast. I have to be honest, I don’t love that Christmas is in the middle of summer. But I do love summer itself. Hello, long evenings, bright sunshine, and cold drinks. Yes sir, summer is my favourite season, and I’m lucky I can handle the heat pretty well. This afternoon, I walked home in mid-30ºC temperatures, and by the time I got home, I was a sweaty mess but a happy sweaty mess. I guess there’s a reason a friend used to call me Sahara. Christmas probably makes winter more fun, but I still love our quirky upside-down version. Quirky is good. Double Christmas Fun One of the things I love about this time of year is that I feel like I get two Christmases. At preschool, we’re wrapping up the school year and getting ready for the end-of-year concerts and graduation. Our school year ends in December and starts again in the last week of January. The kids are so excited (not always in the best way, yikes!), and there’s just this general buzz in the air. It also helps that I work with some of the most fun people on the planet. This time of year is definitely my favourite, and even though it’s chaos, it’s good fun chaos. Then, once school’s out (ten days to go but who’s counting?), we kick off round two of Christmas prep at home, making sure everything is ready for the “real” Christmas. Two Christmases in one. I love that. Food For Christmas lunch, it’s often the custom to go for food that suits the weather. Things like prawns, oysters, cold ham, turkey and salads. I enjoy all of that, but I also love the traditional Christmas food like turkey, glazed ham (I have the most amazing glazed ham recipe), roast potatoes and gravy, always lots of gravy. So I do what a lot of people who celebrate Christmas in summer do and combine both. We start with seafood as an entrée and then tuck into the more traditional Christmas fare. It’s the best of both worlds! Carols, Music and Summer Nights One of the things I love about Christmas in Australia is Carols by Candlelight, like the one held in the Domain in Sydney (and similar events in other cities). I’ve never been to the Domain myself, but it’s televised, so I watch it every year while I’m wrapping presents. The audience is always in summer clothes, and there’s no snow, no frosty air, but it still looks very Christmassy to me. Lights We have pockets of streets where decorating houses with Christmas lights is a real thing. It kind of moves around from year to year, depending on how the decorating fever hits. You know how it goes: one house goes all out, then the next one gets inspired, and before you know it, the whole street becomes famous for it. Not everyone decorates their house, but those who do really go for it. I don’t know if it’s the same overseas, maybe in the northern hemisphere it is, or maybe that’s just a Hallmark movie thing, you’ll have to let me know. The funny part is, because it’s summer, it doesn’t get dark until after 8 pm, so the lights can’t really shine until then. The news often runs a segment announcing the best streets to see, and suddenly everyone rushes over. I used to decorate our house, it was me and the neighbour across the street. Now it’s just the neighbour across the street. I got tired of untangling the lights and acting like a cranky Grinch. How do people even keep their lights tidy? The Decorations That Never Match the Weather I laugh on the inside when I stop and think about the mismatch of winter decorations in a hot climate. Snowflakes on windows. Reindeers in 30-degree heat. A fake fireplace on the TV while you’re sitting there in shorts. And then we have Christmas cards that try to represent us better, with Santa in shorts surfing. Too funny! So that’s what I love about Christmas in Australia. It’s hot, sticky and sweaty, but a picture-perfect traditional winter white Christmas is only a long-haul 14 to 24-hour plane ride away, depending on your destination. Lucky us, right?