Our New Years Eve in Alice felt a lot like a good old fashioned 4th of July. There were several big parties at bars around town and a big shin dig at the casino but we had been invited to a friend’s house for a neighborhood party.
Since we are in Australia and have that summer thing going on this
time of year, the party was outdoors and the food came off the Barbie. Hosts of the annual party were Mike and Jo Heyburn. She’s an Australian of Italian decent and he’s an American from Chicago. Last year she made pizza and tiramisu and this year Mike cooked Chicago style hot dogs on the grill. We munched corn chips and salsa, ate water melon and even had cream filled chocolate and yellow cupcakes made by yours truly. (see cupcake baking hell story below) When midnight rolled around we walked out the back gate onto the golf course and watched the fireworks at the casino.
It’s New Year’s Eve and the biggest worry is if everyone got insect repellant.
Water melon, glow sticks and sparklers were the highlights to short people who weren’t allowed to stay up for the fireworks.
Mike’s mom was here from Chicago and she took over cupcake duty.
Midnight on the golf course. The view is better from the actual green but the sprinklers kicked on about 11:45 so we found a nice dry spot off to one side to watch.
Even though this is my second holiday season in the southern hemisphere, the fact that we can go to a New Years Eve party in shorts and flip flops is still sort of surreal. They jury’s still out on whether’m starting to fit in or just getting old. I really prefer the chilling out with friends in a casual atmosphere having a nice glass of wine to gsetting dressed up, paying hundreds of dollars to drink cheap champagne with hundreds of people I don’t know. Even if, after few (OK maybe several) glasses of wine and a couple glasses of limoncello, I invited everyone to our house for a biscuits and gravy brunch the next day.
When the alarm went off the next morning, I grumbled “Why?” my darling husband gleefully reminded me of the breakfast invitation I had issued the night before. Fortunately, I had remembered to take the sausage out of the freezer the night before, so I fried 4 pounds of sausage, made a double batch of buttermilk biscuits, whipped up a fruit salad, scrambled a dozen eggs and made a whole bunch of coffee. Six slow moving burry eyed people appeared on my doors step at 10:30 and ate every bit of the B&Gs and rounded out the meal with a mimosa. For the previous night’s hostess, it was first she’d had the ultimate American hangover food. She is a tiny person who shoved in an impressive four biscuits and mounds of sausage gravy and declared it her new favorite hang over cure.
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