I've been looking forward to Christmas since September.

And what is it I look forward to? The gathering of friends, the spirit of sharing, love and joy and the fact that Christmas presents a great time to do many special things we often overlook in our busy schedules.

Christmas, in spite of the increasing commercialisation, has retained, for me, a sense of redemption.

A time to look at life remembering Peace, Joy, Forgiveness, Renewal and Love.

Christmas over the last 4-5 years has more than ever been both a time of Celebration of these values as well as an Imploration to actually remember these values. And this is what I love about Christmas.

There are also pockets of traditions that we've come to observe as a family and amongst groups of friends during this time. For one, we put up a Christmas Tree at home. This seems so natural for many households. For ours, it signified a transition into a time when we held one common faith as a family. From what I know, this is rather rare in many families. This was a long battle that Mum fought silently and won with a triumphant display of decorations on our humble Christmas Tree year after year since.

Every year, there is always the Christmas drinking party at Wanching's. Every year, hordes of her groups of friends gather together and explore what it feels like to drink a little more alcohol than the year before. Every year, new games are invented at the drinking table. Most of which are designed to make you drink no matter what you do! Looking back, it's been almost 7 years of partying at Wanching's. What great fun it is and more amazingly, to see some of us move on from swinging singletons into the world of marriage and motherhood. Yet, these parties are never any less fun or less relevant. Kudos to the woman who always makes this happen for all of us, year after year.

This year, there will be a special pre-Christmas dinner with the girls, Cynthia, Erene and Nanfang. We've always had some kind of Reunion dinner of our own pre Chinese New Year and this one just adds to the tradition of getting together as a "family" of friends. We will have a Secret Santa game this Christmas and I'm just waiting to seeing how good Erene is at letting someone steal her present!

As for me and Ken, we are still deliberating if we should go away on a trip this year. Having just come back from a honeymoon 6 months ago, the wanderlust bug has bitten again before the bank account has time to recuperate. We really want to go away but the recession looms ahead and we are cognizant it will be important that we save up while we can. Indulgences like Traveling every 6 months might have to be shelved...

In spite of this, there is so much to celebrate about Christmas that being around our loved ones might be more than enough this year.

I. Heart. Christmas.

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