Midwinter Solstice Fun

How did we celebrate the midwinter solstice down under?  Not the way we’ve ever celebrated any other solstice. This time we ended up making marmalade and participating in a pub quiz — two firsts for us.

The making of marmalade was actually a several day affair. Remember the tree we wrote about when it was blossoming and the smell was reminding us that it was Spring in October? Back then I thought it was an orange tree, but it now has several hundred grapefruit on it. (We also have a smaller orange tree, a persimmon tree, and a lemon tree on the property).

We found several different recipes for marmalade in the cookbooks in our kitchen, and so we began experimenting. We have made grapefruit marmalade, grapefruit and orange marmalade, and orange marmalade. Each one takes several hours worth of cooking and stirring, and a scary amount of sugar (1 cup sugar for every cup of grapefruit pulp)!  But we have now made several batches and have added to the well-stocked top shelf of the pantry, which still has marmalade made by the previous resident friends!

Since each grapefruit makes about 1/2 jar of marmalade, there’s no way we can make them ALL into marmalade. So we’ve picked them and put them out on Sunday morning for members of Mt. Eden worship group. We’ve also made the staff at our gym happy by taking over several dozen grapefruit for their staff room. A bit of bright yellow sunshine during the short days of winter!

The pub quiz win came about because Ashley, a young Quaker from Oregon who is living in Auckland and attending Mt. Eden worship group, invited us to her birthday celebration on June 21. So on a cold, wet and windy night we bundled up and walked two blocks to the local barbecue joint, just in time to join in with their weekly pub quiz. Our team, made up of a group of 20- to 30-year-olds plus the two of us, turned out to have a nice balance of well-traveled people, sports fans, pop culture followers, and — yes — people like us who used age and music degrees to recognize the theme song to the 1960’s “Get Smart” TV show, define what a hurdy-gurdy was, and name Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” as the classical music used in the movie “Platoon”.  It was a fun evening, and the bonus for us all was that we were able to gift the $100 first-place prize to Ashley for her birthday.