Santa has been, and so has the stork

We have a Christmas baby! on Christmas Eve a passenger spotted a penguin chick, conveniently close to our hut. Pengy has since had a second successful hatching, and they are both peeping away and being fed regularly. How nice to see, we had been wandering around the island daily, looking at any standing mum (or dad I suppose) to see if there were still just eggs underneath or a little furry bundle. We are so looking forward to them running about, but slightly apprehensive about the pooping mess to come.
Talking of pooping penguins! we have a population explosion. There is a small plastic penguin that has been living in our bunkroom for some years, but his origin was unknown. He needs feeding with poops and then on winding up he flaps his way across the table, pooping regularly, but with not quite the same force as the real things fortunately. Now, the tragic thing was that this penguin had run out of poops and there were no suitable substitutes to be found. I knew none of this, but saw a pooper at home and brought one here for Rick's birthday. What joy! now there were two and they were able to poop and flap with each other to their heart's content. Now the amazing thing is that we have each received another as a christmas present! Oh dear, you can have too much of a good thing. We have managed to give one away so far, to a couple of Ukranian scientists who stayed with us on Boxing Day, but that's another story!

To briefly recap the last couple of days - we had a mad Christmas Eve, with three ships visiting and another calling in briefly to buy 2000 stamps and send mail. The evening turned sunny and warm and we were invited out for a barbecue on board. A lovely meal, quite surreal as they played King's College carols for us as we stood on deck in the sun with snowy mountains and icebergs all around. A far cry from the dark early nights of home. And Christmas day worked out perfectly with one ship in the morning, full of Christmas cheer. Rachel and I have taken to singing carols in the shop - sometimes the passengers join in, and sometimes they just look at us as if we are mad and ask us how long we have been here ..... too long obviously. We then had the afternoon to ourselves, put the fire on and warmed up the lounge, turned on the ipod Christmas carols, and had a cheese sandwich followed by Christmas pud and brandy sauce. Spent a lovely couple of hours opening presents and drinkin
g champagne - we were so lucky with timing as we received more mail on the 23rd - parcels and cards all round! a big thank you friends and family. A yacht came by later on, I did get round to making the mulled wine as we rushed about clearing up all the debris of paper and sweetie wrappings. So we had a few more visitors, and then happily another ship came in and invited us our for Christmas dinner - so we did get turkey after all.