'twas the Season

Greetings, dear readers

If you’re brand-new to my fan club, I highly recommend checking out my previous posts to avoid any confusion about me and the nature of my species. (Hint: I don’t run on red blood cells).

And here’s a quick refresher of who’s who in our sweatshop clan:

Nerina (the classic early 70s model)

Nirbe (me)

Aibren (who looks a lot like me)

Brinane (who has all the bells and whistles and can even embroider)

Nabirne (our overlocker brother)

Right, back to the fun stuff

I wish you all a happy New Year. Belated, sorry! Well, it’s not belated if you’re Chinese. For those of you who are, I hope to be on time with your wishes. So here goes: May 2026 treat you kindly and shower you with great surprises, round-the-world yacht trips, extended spa treatments, silent retreats, obedient children and whatever else is on your wish-list.

What rendered me incommunicado over the past weeks was not physical burnout. Queen Kami would have remedied that in record time, as she cannot deal with an impaired workforce. No, no. My radio silence was due to an external development.

Queen Kami and Hubby had decided to up and leave for a short-notice vacation with Firstborn, who’d hopped over from the freezing North for Christmas with her folks. So, while the three of them (occasionally joined by a cousin or two) sweltered away in the Cape Winelands, visiting wine cellars to lower their body temperatures with taster portions of chilled Rose, Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc (the queen does not tolerate red wine), I was left to mope in the depressing darkness of the craft studio-slash-office-slash-yoga space. And no, this multi-purpose room is not the spacious thirty-square-metre state-of-the-art facility you’re seeing in your head. It’s less than six square metres of messy panic space. Thank goodness the queen had turned off the light before her departure. The darkish ambiance was enough to dim the clutter, which had reached magnanimous proportions.

Home alone

The relative silence was quite heavenly. Relative, because I still had the five-thirty am rooster crow floating in from the neighbours. And the far-off barking of frustrated dogs. And, shucks, there was something else, too. I must still be suffering from PTSD. The horrific thunderstorms! Thank goodness I wasn’t shocked to pieces, which could have easily happened as Queen Kami had never unplugged me!

So, seeing as I was permanently connected to my source of power (apart from a three-day electricity blackout), I spent a lot of time in my own head, either fearing for my life, or thinking about Christmasses past. Not Dickens ghosts. The actual royal household occasions.

First Northern Hemisphere Christmas

That first Christmas in the land of Queen Kami’s forebears was quite something. The royal family had done a bit of research about celebrating Christmas and New Year in what they called the wrong season, even though it was finally the season they’d been seeing in all those cheesy Christmas movies. Family traditions needed a complete turnaround. No going to the beach on Christmas day. No barbecue and patio party for New Year’s Eve. They needed to get their minds around hot indoor food, Glühwein (mulled wine if you’re part of the ignorant English contingent), a real pine Christmas tree (no wishy-washy plastic version), traditional cookies (Lebkuchen and Zimtsterne) and a few other things that they only discovered by their second German Christmas.

I heard all about the ambitious plans was when Queen Kami stormed into the basement studio after the family’s first (and apparently last) ski holiday. My siblings and I had been waiting in terrified anticipation since we felt the vibrations of the family storming into the house. As I had a great view of the last few stairs from my possie on the sweatshop table, I started looking out for the royal descent. When the queen did eventually storm down the stairs, she encountered a slight hiccup. At stair number three, I saw two Christmas-socked feet launch into thin air. There were wild body contortions until one hand got a grip on the railing. Phew. That had almost been a royal disaster.

Queen Kami skidded into the studio. “Hello underlings! I almost re-injured my coccyx there. You won’t believe how many times I landed on my butt on the Austrian ice. Don’t let anyone tell you they have lovely, soft snow on ski slopes. Solid ice, I tell you. Mind you, I never made it onto the slopes anyway. Hubby and I didn’t get past the Idiotenhügel.” I later hacked into Google to get the translation: Idiot’s Hill. Oh my!

Queen Kami walked to the far end of the room to pull open the curtain that hid her infamous metal shelves. The ones Hubby had almost not installed for fear of weakening the supporting wall and causing the house to implode. (You can read about that here.) Stuff got shifted around. She didn’t find what she was looking for! She trotted back to our table, yanked out a chair, and schlepped it back to the shelves. The desired stash was higher up.

“Can you see what she’s doing, Nirbe?” asked my oldest sister, Nerina.

“She’s got a roll of wire and that box of random wooden blocks. And, oh my word, she’s got Hubby’s drill.”

“What do you think she’s planning?”

“Keine Ahnung!” I answered. We’d learnt this phrase from Lastborn. It means “I don’t have a clue.”

Queen Kami plonked everything down smack in the middle of the room. “Argh! I knew I needed the trestle table before Christmas. Now I need to park my injured butt on the concrete to do this.”

One of the offspring called from upstairs, and her royal Kamikazeness trotted up to the ground floor again. This time, her pace was slower. Non-slip socks would have been a good idea.

Then followed two lifetimes of muted front-door-banging, which we couldn’t hear, of course, but the vibrations through our ceiling were less violent than the ones we used to feel back in the Motherland. The German doors all had rubber seals to keep out the cold, and noise, and whatnot. Man, these people can build. The wall sockets in our studio were dead-level, and the corners of the room were unbelievably square. Incredible!

Eventually, the queen tripled back downstairs, carrying a mug of coffee and wearing a tiara of scattered pine needles. How I wished I could smell. Apparently Christmas tree scent is out of this world.

We had a flurry of creative chaos. Queen Kami spread a drop sheet on the floor, drilled holes into little wood off-cuts — and not into her hands, thank the Lord — and proceeded to rub white paint over her funky blocks. Then she sprayed them with some kind of fake snow stuff. Wire was cut and bent into hooks, and her DIY ornaments (yes, we’d figured out the end-product by then) got stacked in rows to dry.

Meanwhile, the cookie-baking battalion was in full swing upstairs. Secondborn rushed into the studio at some point. She handed the queen a warped cookie. Goodness knows how she had ended up with a Van Gogh star. I was seriously impressed.

“Mom, I need black thread.“

“What on earth for?” asked Queen Kami.

Secondborn rolled her eyes. “We spoke about this last week, remember? We want to hang some cookies on the tree. Don’t worry, we know what we’re doing.” And she strolled back upstairs with the cookie-hanger thread.

Five minutes later, Lastborn appeared with an armful of pine cones. “Check these out. I got them in the forest with Dad. But he said the big ones might break the branches. He’s way too paranoid. So, I’ve got the medium ones here. We need your white and silver paint.” She plonked herself down, scooped aside the crazy blocks and started her pine-cone upcycling while the queen worked on more tree-trinkets that involved wire, felt and bits of glitter board. There were no bright colours. The plan was to go au naturale (but not completely environmentally friendly, because of the glitter and toxic paint).

Three hours, two glue-gun burns and one bone-deep finger-cut later, the Christmas tree bling was ready. My siblings and I had not been needed for any of this. Phew!

The queen later showed us a photo of the tree, and I must admit it had turned out quite marvellous. Thank heavens they had used battery string lights. Hubby had apparently almost suffered a heart attack when the queen suggested real candles. I wish I could show you the photo of the magnificent tree, but it got wiped off Queen Kami’s phone at some point. Sorry!

In keeping with the au naturale theme, Queen Kami later hauled her gifts down and covered them with bits of hessian and white ribbon from her huge stash. (There were three shoe boxes filled with all manner of ribbons.) “I told them how much money we’d save by bringing over all my stuff,” she boasted while giving herself blister number three with the hot glue gun. She suffers from delayed pain reactions. In fact, I do believe some of her nerve endings have perished, together with a few fingerprint lines.

First Snowperson

It snowed the day after Christmas that first year. The white layer on the postcard-sized lawn was thin, but the offspring gathered every milligram to create their minute masterpiece.

At some point, Firstborn, who’s always the project manager, no matter what project, rushed past us to raid the queen’s fabric crates for a ‘scarf’ and ‘cloak’. She grabbed a fistful of large buttons on her way out. In the photo she showed us later, the royal garden looked splendid with its mop-haired, carrot-nosed, scarved, buttoned and bespectacled snow-person. (Firstborn insists on gender-neutral descriptions and titles.)

Here’s a photo of their second-ever snowperson, which they built in the nearby forest. This one was more minimalist, as Firstborn refused to run all the way back home to collect a cloak and scarf.

The royal family had made a huge success of their first Northern Hemisphere Christmas. For a few days, my siblings and I rocked along to the happy vibes and music and giggle vibrations that made their way down to our studio.

But we knew the merriment would end soon. The four of us on that sweat-shop table, plus my little sister, Aibren, underneath the table, still had no clue what ambitious projects Queen Kami would need us for in the weeks to come.

In the next few instalments, I’ll reveal all.

Toodles

Nirbe