Christmas Holidays

It’s the holidays and it has been a little over week since my graduation. It’s still snowing ‘proper’ snow, which is fine because I have nowhere I really need to be and it is nice just to be able to sit back, relax and watch the snow fall. I hired out my gown for an extra week so that we could take some family pictures in a studio but I soon realised that with the run up to Christmas, most people had hired studios to take family portraits and so our choice of studies was limited. Luckily my uncle (nasir chachu) has a photo studio and thankfully he was available which is great as I running out of time to return my gown.

Advantages of using services provided by family members. You feel much more at ease and in the case of photo’s we took quite a few because a) I blinked quite a lot at the wrong times apparently and b) Dad and Bilal are such posers who were only further encouraged by Nasir chachu, lol. Saeed mamoo and auntie Naseem were also out and about in Leeds shopping and popped in to see how we were getting on. The only disadvantage for using family I would say, are that they don’t let you pay and therefore I feel even worse for taking up so much of their time!

The photo’s that chachu took came out really well (mA) and even my official single portrait from Manchester University was good… well looking at the proofs, I still have to order the real thing. All in all, the day went well and I enjoyed being with my family. The hols were spent at home with my family, watching stuff on TV until the post office opened up again allowing me to post my gown back to the company and breathe a sigh of relief that everything went well.

Returning my gown - I particularly like the tag where it orders me to not to leave the country with the gown. Um... ok, I'll try not to :P

Unfortunately we didn’t have a big family Christmas dinner this year as the Ali family were in Pakistan and as soon as they get back, Auntie Naseem is jetting off to Pakistan for two weeks. It feels a bit like a relay race to and from Pakistan at the moment, lol. Therefore not an ideal time to have a graduation party and I’m afraid my cousin Sara will have to wait a little bit longer. Bilal’s birthday is soon approaching so hopefully we’ll have a combined party then when everyone is back from their holidays and free from exams and what not.

In other news, I am still LOVING the snow! Snowman building has been rife in our area and even my mum couldn’t resist having a go, lol. Pictures of a couple of our attempts are shown below. There is something about fresh snow and Christmas that goes so well together and we haven’t had much of it these past few years. Definitely a welcome change and we’ll enjoy it as long as we can :)

Exhibit A is mum's attempt and exhibit B is Bilal's attempt :)

Unfortunately we think mum's snowman has been going out secretly partying at night. We found him the next morning a little worse for wear, legless shall we say? ;) Legless, geddit? No? Ok, well I found it funny!

Bilal felt it was right to read a janazah for mum's snowman. Talk about getting easily attached!