When the castells season is full on in Catalonia, winter in Sydney makes rehearsals at Hyde park more challenging: it’s dark and it’s cold, and not many people feel like standing bare foot on the freezing grass. But the good news is that winter also brings one of our favourite social events of the year: it’s time for our Christmas in July party!
As usual, we celebrated it at the Gure Txoko (the Basque club)… and this year we even got overbooking! The family is growing fast… and everyone knew that food would be worth it and no one wanted to miss it. The menu was the same as last year: galets soup, canelons and homemade suchard torró. Yes, Christmas traditions are good for a reason… so if something works and it’s delicious, why should we make any changes?
A large team of cooks met on Friday evening to start cooking the Christmas lunch… they prepared the soup and made the small meatballs, the beixamel for the canelons and also the torró and rice pudding. We are definitely getting better at this, because the cooks even left early (-ish) from the Txoko…! (At least midnight is early for our standards…)
But next morning a bad surprise was waiting for the cooks: the beixamel had curdled and they had to start all over again. Since we had to prepare more than 240 canelons and it was not possible to do it without the beixamel, the lunch started a bit later than scheduled… but it was sunny and we had music, something to drink and the best company ever, so actually nobody minded.
After enjoying a yummy lunch, it was time for our 3rd AGM. The board members presented a summary of the last year’s activities, finances and upcoming events. Also, last-year’s board panel was re-elected and the colla gave a very nice poster of our first 4 of 6 to Juanjo, our cap de colla, to thank him for making of our colla the best family in the Antipodes.
At the end, a video summarising the best moments of the year (brilliant job, Ivet!) was played… although everyone had to watch it on their phones at the same time because by then the lamp of the projector had died. Oh well… things happen. It was amazing… and you can watch it now here!
After this, the party started (or rather kept going?)… but that’s another story for another day! “Merry Christmas” from the Down Under!
