Welcome again to the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge, a year-long challenge set by the good folk at Long and Short Reviews that anyone can participate in. Check out the site to see who else is playing along.

This week’s topic:

Favourite Holiday of the Year and Why

I completely misunderstood the topic on first reading and wrote an entire post lamenting that I hadn’t been on holiday this year and that to answer this topic I’d have to go back and choose one from the past. So I picked our first French road trip, wrote a lovely piece about what a blast it was, then fell down the rabbit hole of reminiscing over old holiday photos.

Only when I went to load the post and re-read the topic did I realise that it wasn’t what I thought.

It’s not favourite holiday as in holiday-holiday but favourite holiday as in as in Easter, Christmas … that kind of thing.

I’m not sure we refer to them as holidays in Australia, do we? More like long weekends – Queen’s Birthday long weekend, Australia Day long weekend, and Christmas is just Christmas and Easter is just Easter and New Years is New Years. Maybe younger folk say “happy holidays”, but no one I know does. It’s more a North American term I suspect.

But I digress.

What is my favourite? I’ve always been very partial to Easter. It falls in autumn and I adore that season, and there’s the excuse to eat hot cross buns and lots of beautiful seafood and let’s not forget all that chocolate.

But mostly I like the Easter break because it holds such fond memories.

Growing up, we used to spend most Easters down at our beach shack at Nene Valley, a tiny fishing village right down the very bottom of South Australia, not far from the Victorian border, on what has now been labelled the Limestone Coast.

There’s no valley at Nene Valley. The village was named after a barque that was wrecked nearby in 1854, with the loss of four lives. Two other ships also foundered here, and the SS Admella famously came to grief only a little further up the coast, killing 89 (you can read more about that tragedy here). When I was a kid, at extremely low tide you could still see the remains of one of the other Nene Valley wrecks, but the sea and sand have covered it now.

It’s a wonderful place and we had a bazillion adventures there, even if the weather did have a habit of turning foul at Easter. We’d still find fun. And eat lots of crayfish.

One of these days I’ll write a story set in a little community like Nene Valley. I have a few ideas rumbling around the back of my brain already, one of which I’m rather excited about. Whether it has enough strength to become a full-blown story, we’ll just have to see. I think it will. In the meantime, I still have plenty of other stories to write.

What’s your favourite holiday?

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