It has been a mad year and a bit, and last night I was com­ment­ing to Naomi that I feel as if I’ve been run off my feet. It could have been tired­ness from work. It could also have been the beers and wine I took try­ing to ame­lio­rate the tiredness.

I decided this week to observe the tra­di­tional Chi­nese obser­va­tion of the win­ter sol­stice because it was prob­a­bly the only Chi­nese cus­tom my mother observed dili­gently and con­sis­tently. So last night, Naomi and I went and bought rice flour to make the gluti­nous rice balls (tang yuan), pan­dan leaf for the syrup/soup and beet­root to make the col­or­ing for pink tang yuans.

It was a dou­ble treat for Kai espe­cially as he got to make the tang yuan him­self before wal­lop­ing three help­ings for break­fast (Starch and sugar is an awe­some com­bi­na­tion for an active 2.5 year old, and I left for work so Naomi could expe­ri­ence the effects on Kai all by herself).

Naomi’s mum says that win­ter sol­stice tang yuan are spe­cial because they can automag­i­cally tell whether your age is an odd or even num­ber by the num­ber of tang yuans in your bowl, no mat­ter how ran­domly you scoop them out of the pot.

It worked for Kai, Naomi and our helper, but I spoiled the stats by eat­ing every­thing before remem­ber­ing to count them.

My mother, being the Malayan-born western-educated ethnic-Chinese career woman that she was, used to tell my sib­lings and I when we were young, that this obser­vance was known as “Chi­nese Christ­mas”, and that if we didn’t wake up early to roll the tang yuan and fin­ish off the balls, the “real” Christ­mas wouldn’t come, which meant Santa wouldn’t deliver the goods.

This is the first Chi­nese Christ­mas with­out my mum. I miss her, but I think she’ll be happy her obser­vance and spe­cial back story will have some more mileage with Kai for a while.