Midwinter Christmas Spring Fling!

Sep 25, 2025
2 min read

Saturday 13 September

Better late than never - Saturday was our long awaited Midwinter Christmas Spring Fling kindly hosted this year by Tim & Tineke at their lovely place in Te Atatu.

We all had our Secret Santa details, a floral dress code and were allocated our contributions towards the veggies, desserts and drinkies to bring along. We arrived early to get the chooks in the outside oven and help set things up - Liesje had already done an awesome job with floral decor and had created three gorgeous flower crowns for herself, Tineke & me (though pretty much everyone got a turn at wearing them!)

We had an awesome day with 13 of us partying together - Tim & Tineke, Liesje, Abby & Jez, Nickie & Russ, Mairi & Tim, Cheryl & Mark and of course us two. Tim wilfully misread the dress code and came as "Flour" which was brilliant.

Highlight of the day was meeting Santa, and behaving inappropriately as the Secret Santa gifts were handed out. Everyone had been pre-allocated a Secret Santa gift recipient and the challenge was to find a gift for $10 or less, preferably from an op shop or hand crafted (regifting was not ruled out)!

We all got some great gifts, but I think I was the winner - receiving a Van Gogh jigsaw PLUS a brand new pack of Foster Grants 1.75 reading glasses - 3 pairs with matching cases! We are all at that age that we really appreciated the extra optometry assistance and the spectacles were used by several people throughout the day!

Tim & Tineke made a wonderful welcome speech to everyone - and we were all super grateful that they had taken on the task of hosting this Midwinter Christmas tradition which had started small in our place in BHB around 12 years earlier.

Everyone had made a sterling effort prepping and cooking all the extras for our traditional(ish) Christmas dinner, and the outside oven was kept busy roasting chooks, heating the ham, making perfect duck fat roast potatoes and cooking Yorkshire puddings to perfection. What a great dinner!

As is tradition, we took ourselves off for a Wally Walk - this time around the Te Atatu peninsula boardwalk to make room for dessert!

Dessert was delicious - glad we had managed to make some room for it! Christmas pud, trifle, pavlova, chocolate mousse, ambrosia and lashings of cream & custard!