winter traditions

It's been along time since my last post, so whilst I'm on night watch I thought I would take the time to update you all (as I'm writing this at 4 in the morning apologies for any spelling or grammar errors!)

Winter has been an awesome time of year with lots happening so I'm going to start off with explaining some of the winter traditions that we have on base.

The first of which is the flag down ceremony which marks the day when the sun sets for winter. Once set it does not reappear again for another two months. It is not completely dark for the two months instead we have a shorter and shorter period of twilight until midwinter when there is less than two hours of twilight.

Samways the staion leader sharing some words of wisdom 

Trev lowering the flag

The day is marked with a small ceremony at the station's flag pole where it is tradition that the oldest base member lowers the flag as the sun sets. Trev had this honour he also shared a poem that he had written himself. We then enjoyed the rest of the day off to celebrate!

After flag down everyone’s focus moved to Midwinters day. Midwinter is very important as it marks the shortest day of the year and the promise that the days will get longer and the sun will soon return.  It’s like Christmas with time off to relax a big dinner and presents!

Midwinter greetings from some of our fellow wintering stations our equivalent of Christmas cards

The day started by Samways waking everyone up with tea and coffee in bed, before he headed to the kitchen to cook us all breakfast (eggs Benedict!).

Some of us then settled down to a board game before getting our smart clothes on to begin the celebrating.

We then listened to Samways share more words of wisdom and to pass on some mid winter greetings including messages from friends from the summer team the governor of the British Antarctic Territories and Theresa May.

We then moved onto the giving of the winter gifts. Way back on our first day of winter we each drew a name out of a hat. We then had up until midwinter to make our person a gift. Needless to say the last weeks, days, hours running up to midwinter were spent making overly ambitious gifts.

I made a gift for Julie. I sketched some scenes from our winter trip then learnt how to make a frame to present them in.

In return Steve made me a gift. He done an excellent job of re-fashioning an old pyramid tent into a backpack and hammock!

Here are some of the other gifts. They were all of a very high standard!

After the present giving we all sat down for our feast!

Trev cooked up a magnificent 9 courses! It was full of culinary delights with flavours that we hadn't tasted for a very long time!

Half way through the meal we all ran across to the ops tower to tune into the world service where Cerise Matthews read out the midwinter broadcast with guests David Attenborough Bill Bailey and many more listen in here! http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p056bgm4 

The last tradition of winter is flag up. This celebrates the return of the sun which was most welcome after being absent for two months. In contrast to flag down, the responsibility of raising the flag goes to the youngest. Which is me!

I  also had to give a speech to mark the occasion after writing some inspirational words I decided to go against tradition and invited everyone to join me in an interpretive dance to Jimmy Cliff's song wonderful world! We all had a good laugh and thankfully I wasn't the only one dancing!