Happy Holidays (2008)

For a few years, way back when – we use to publish a “Pascual Family News”. It was our way of keeping in touch with the family as we were taken ashore in a remote region called AUSTRALIA, where the closest sibling is around 1000km away.

But now – there is the WordPress blog, and although I am not a prolific writer by any measure – it does contain a few highlights of our year.

I came to learn however, that my youngest (Jessica), came to dread my yearly ‘family report’. “How is dad gonna summarise my year?”, she thought. – Well, she did something really interesting this year, she painted her room! She removed the Disney characters in the window, the glow-in-the dark stickers in the ceiling and even painted a feature wall. She also redecorated her bedroom, bought new bed and bedroom furnitures to have a Marie Antoinette theme for her chair, mirror, table and bed frame. What even made this special – is that she worked and saved up for this project, planned and executed it. If only I could paint her sense of satisfaction when she completed it.

Next year, Jessica has set her mind to travel, with her friends, to New York, Washington D.C. and Vancouver. They have already secured their tickets and frantically saving for pocket money – not a very easy task with our shrinking Australian Dollar.

The highlight of Celine’s year – of course, is her trip to Chicago and Los Angeles. She even saw a bit of Shanghai during the Beijing Olympics.

We can not thank enough Tito Emil and Tita Vangie for looking after Celine and her friends in Chicago. Tita Neng-neng made her feel welcome and managed to get Celine to sing over the phone.

A big thank you to our college pal Bernie Floresca for taking Celine around Chicago for an afternoon.

We are also very much humbled by the generosity of our good friends Jing and Elpie Advincula, who not only housed the 3 girls – Celine, Linda and Kirsty in L.A., they treated them for the musical “Wicked”. That treat is very special to these girls – and you may have just planted a seed of generosity in their hearts as well.

As for me and Jeanne – this year made us realised how grown-up our daughters are already. On some level, we can’t even call them our dependants any more. We are not at all immune to what is happening all around us, we do have our own share of the crisis currently sweeping the world. We wish, however, that everyone of us get through these tough times and face a brighter New Year.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!

On the right column called ‘RANDOM PHOTOS’ are pictures we’ve taken throughout the year. You can view all of them at this Gallery. It include the Easter Egg Hunt with our neighbors, Jeanne’s inclusion on the Blacktown mural. Photos from the visits of Annie and Johnny, the visit from Cesar Madrid and family, visit from Mark Go. Some travel photos of Celine and our short break at Canberra. This year’s Music by Moonlight, World Youth Day, Spring Cycling, City-to-Surf, Seven Bridges Walk etc.

Tagged as: Christmas

Categorised in: Feature Story, Journal Entry