#stephensday

"Boxing Day / St. Stephen's"

~Christmas and New Years in Waterford~

Here are just a few pictures from the 10 days I spent in Waterford over Christmas!!

My first Christmas away from home was definitely an odd feeling, but I was lucky enough to have Kieran’s family to celebrate with and I can confidently say that they looked after me very, very well. Plenty of food, sweets, drinks, and of course, plenty of craic the whole time I was down ;)

Originally I thought I was going to have to work on the 28th and 29th of December, but luckily they gave me those 2 days off at the last minute, so it saved me some hassle of going back and forth to Dublin so that was a nice surprise.

A couple observations I made about Christmas time in Ireland:

~I feel like the amount of cookies Americans consume during Christmas time is similar to the amount of chocolates the Irish consume during the holidays. There are 4 main tubs of chocolates that you will see literally everywhere in December: Roses, Celebrations, Heroes, and Quality Street (pictured above). I feel like I saw and ate so many of them over the last month that I don’t even crave chocolate the way I normally do…well, at least for now.

~This could just be Kieran’s family, but they are really big on this soda, or should I say fizzy drink (soda is just so American) called Club Orange (also pictured above). Kieran says it’s one of those drinks that he only usually drinks at Christmas time and not really at all for the rest of the year. Regardless, it was really tasty and paired well with Christmas dinner!

~They have a tradition where they put Christmas Crackers on the dinner table, (there is a picture of one on the table with the Club Oranges). Basically they are these decorative cardboard tubes that have mini prizes in the middle. You have to do a little tug of war with someone at the table to snap and break it open so that one person gets the prize. It’s fun and for the record I think I was 3 for 3 in my victories ;)

~St. Stephen’s Day (the 26th of December) is a big deal here. Although we didn’t spend the actual day doing much, it’s a bank holiday so not much would be open, or if places were open, they had very limited hours. It’s a big day for going out in the pubs (no surprise there, this is Ireland we are talking about after all). We spent the night in our favorite pub, Murph’s, which was a lot of fun!

As far as the rest of the week goes, we took a lot of walks around Tramore and Waterford City, enjoying all of the beautiful views they have to offer. One afternoon, we took a trip to Dungarvan, a small village about 40 minutes from Tramore. We took advantage of the post-Christmas sales before getting a nice meal in a pub. The harbour was still all lit up for Christmas which was really beautiful at night :)

We ended up going to Murph’s for New Year’s Eve too (we just really like it there apparently). As usual, they had a live band, so we all enjoyed the music, and honestly the night flew by. It felt weird because I was texting everyone back home at midnight while it was only 7 pm and still 2016 for them…definitely a moment when the time difference is more of a factor. On New Year’s Day, we took a trip to Dunmore East, a cute little fishing village that I had actually been to before back in 2015, but it’s absolutely gorgeous nonetheless. It was a really cold day, so we just took a short walk by the harbour before sitting down in a café for a few cups of tea.

Now, it’s back in the groove of working. It was a nice amount of time off, but I can say it feels really good to be back in the routine of things and eating healthier…or at least attempting to do so.