Happy Christmas to best day ever

LIFE is fast so, if you can, live slow this holiday period.

But before my holidays kick off, the rest of the week will be a dash to buy presents and tie up loose ends at work.

Each year I enjoy the challenge of impressing those I give Christmas gifts to with something outside the box.

So sorry, Mum, that means it won’t be another Endota Spa voucher this year.

After working two of the past three Christmas Days, I’ll have the day off this year and will settle in for some family time. When my dad plays Silver

Bells by American country music artist Jim Reeves — like he did when I visited last week — it’s a sign the Christmas season has well and truly arrived.

Mum loves a musical Christ- mas too and has religiously bought the Spirit of Christmas album — which is sold at Myer and raises money for the Salvation Army — for at least the past 10 years.

One year, trying to outdo her good deed, I bought the album as a present for her. Turned out she had already bought the album a month before Christmas. My Christmas Day begins with a traditional Sri Lankan breakfast of Breudher, a buttery yeast cake filled with sultanas; bread pudding (we freeze the end slices of bread loaves for the final two months of the year in preparation); bananas and Edam cheese. Each year Christmas lunch is a shifting event at my parents’ home or at the home of one of my dad’s three siblings. This year we’ve got a new addition to our family after my cousin gave birth to a boy last week. My godfather dresses as Santa each year, and each year the suit gets dodgier and dodg- ier but the laughs and smiles it brings remain.

After lunch it’s usually a game of road cricket made all the more difficult because it’s played with a tennis ball taped on one side.

Come 7pm, I’ve usually eaten way too much and settle into an evening on the couch to enjoy some time with my immediate family.

Christmas Day signals the imminent arrival of what my friends and I have dubbed “The Best Day of the Year”.

Of course that’s Boxing Day, and with that comes the Boxing Day Test. I was hoping for a rained-out final day of the Perth test so the Ashes would still be on the line at the MCG.

Sadly that’s not the case but I’ll still be glued to the TV come 10am Boxing Day morning.