A casual Christmas meet with the Newcastle Community

After disappearing into a hole for the latter half of this year, I decided to crawl out and organise a casual Christmas meet for the Newcastle community to cap off what turned out to be a really busy December. If I’m to be honest, this mostly came about because I discovered some of my Newcastle-based friends (who I’ve really only gotten to properly know this year) are into lolita! So of course, I added them to the Facebook group and decided that I really should organise something, especially since I could guarantee there’d be more attendees than just me and Rosie this time ^__^ And then I discovered that one of the girls in my Love Live group (who also lives kind of in the area) is into lolita! And then at the Sydney Christmas meet James and I met one girl who lives partway between us and Newcastle as well as a couple who live literally the next suburb over to me and James!

So in the course of a month or two, we added a half dozen new members to the Facebook group, and when I put the event up it was very gratifying to have people RSVP as coming. And, most gratifying of all, James wanted to come along as well! Cue even more excitement!

Now that I was actually going to be hosting a meet for more than just a couple of people, I got my butt into gear and started organising things a little better. I booked us a table at Coco Monde for the afternoon, with the intention of going to Civic Park afterwards for outfit photos or perhaps to some other place with aesthetic Christmas décor. Then I started thinking of some Christmas games we could play, just to give a bit of structure to the day, and prizes I could give – because what good are games if you can’t win anything?

On the day I got dressed, James packed up his outfit, and we drove to our friend Andii's apartment to get ready with her. James got into his outfit, I helped Andii with her coordinate (and we loaned her some items) and James took a quick photo of us girls for his Instagram.

And then we went on our way! Thanks to Andii we got a convenient park in Newcastle and wandered down the street to Coco Monde. James tapped me on the shoulder - Rosie was approaching from the opposite direction! We said made the appropriate introductions and went inside.

Unfortunately Della, who was meant to be our fifth attendee, couldn't make it, but it was still so awesome having four entire people at the meet! Double our usual numbers! We ordered food and drinks just chatted. James and I shared a big breakfast, and all of us shared a desert platter. So much good food! I took no photos for once because I just wanted to enjoy it all ^__^

Then it was time to head to the park for activities and photos. I had prepared two incredibly cheesy games and we found a couple of shady picnic tables that were perfect for them. First up was Christmas pictionary! Since there was so few of us, I did all the drawing while the others guessed, and the first person to guess three got to choose a prize and so on.

For the record...I am not good at drawing!

I am honestly amazed they managed to guess everything ^__^

The next game was what I was calling in my head "candy cane hooking", lol. I gave everyone a candy cane and dumped another twenty-ish on the next table over. The aim was to be the person to ferry the most from that table to our table using only your own candy cane as an implement. It was intense!

I forget who won this one, but what is great is I came prepared with six prizes so everyone got two in the end. I had some accessories and brand novelties and the like...turns out I had amassed quite a few of that sort of thing over the years and it was good to send them to new homes! I was really happy that the others seemed to enjoy themselves and liked prizes too ^__^

Then it was photo time! Not only was it fun to take group photos, it was great to have James bring along a proper camera and take some really cute ones of us three girls together in front of the Christmas decorations.

We also spent some time taking solo photos, of course, and again it was so fun having James and a proper camera around for this. He took photos of all of us, and I took photos of him. You'll have already seen our solo shots in my latest coordinate round up post!

James and I also took some selfies, because of course we did, and we took two rounds of shoe shots - one on the proper camera and one on my phone.

Then it was over! Not a very long meet, but fun. Rosie made a call to get picked up, and the rest of us headed back to our car, where we promptly stripped off most of our layer for the drive. Then it was back to Andii's where James got dressed back to normal and then it was home time.

I am absolutely loving having more people interested and active in the Newcastle community. I am so glad Rosie got things started up again in 2017 and I'm even more glad that it looks like from here there will be more people than just the two of us getting involved! In fact, I'm already planning a (bigger) meet for sometime in the first half of this year and I'm overall just very excited and happy.

And, in case it wasn't obvious, I'm also excited that my cute husband is getting into ouji with me. I have an ouji accessory now, I'm a real lolita! Being able to do this together is great and here's to all the meets in 2019 being as much fun as this was!