Andrew’s Virtual Stocking

Posted on December 24, 2009 with 3 Comments

I am hijacking my own blog today for non-bloggy purposes, so probably a lot of you out there may want to skip over all the posts today. Or maybe you don’t, I mean it is kind of a heartwarming Christmas spirit story, after all! But I hope that at least one person out there cares about today’s posts, and that’s my brother Andrew.

My baby brother Andrew

My brother is 27 years old; two and a half years’ my junior but probably twice as strong and has several inches on me. He has been working hard for the last couple of years to save all his pennies for a rainy day, and it turns out he’s really good at that and had enough for about 365 rainy days! So he has booked himself on a round-the-world, year-long trip. (Ok fine, that was his intention all along. I just liked how the rainy day thing sounded!) He left on December 6th on a flight that took off at 2 am. After a stopover in Hong Kong, he finally arrived in Melbourne after 40 hours and little to no sleep. He’s still in Australia, spending a decidedly un-white Christmas with cousins near Sydney, probably sunbathing on the deck and eating barbecue for lunch! And while we envy him this trip of a lifetime, we also really miss him. It’s the first Christmas he is spending away from us, so we wanted to do something nice for him.

But what to do for a backpacker with no space in his pack for presents? Well you hope he has a little sister like mine, who came up with the awesome idea of making him a “virtual stocking.” So we made him a little stocking card:

Which his hosts printed out and presented to him on Christmas morning. And it sent him on a little online treasure hunt to find cards, messages, photos and stories we’ve put on Teh Interwebz for him! By the time he finds this post, he will have already seen the card above, checked his email, opened a Christmas e-card and been directed to my blog.

So everyone, wish my brother a little Christmas love in the comments will ya?! Mum & Dad & Kelsey, this includes you!

Merry Christmas Andrew! Now go check your email again. Nope, not the travel account; the other one. Well, one of the other ones. You figure it out, it’s supposed to be a treasure hunt!! And come back to the blog starting at 11 am your time, we have Christmas stories for you coming later.