New Year’s Day 2026

January 1, 2026

Even before the day arrived, it was mired in controversy.

The invite from Sara noted it was the  Year of the Fire Horse—which means we’re supposed to charge boldly into the future. This was immediately challenged by Phil who claimed it wasn’t the year of the (wood) horse until Feb 17 – a claim which was in fact correct . Then Sally challenged the suggested fen shui colours for 2026 ……nonetheless, invitees observed the dress code although some people’s colour interpretation left much to be desired…..

Julie’s interpretation of “ emerald green” was questionable and you had to hunt hard to find red in Sally’s dress. Robie got the gold right, and Jen and Betsy managed outfits with all the colours …..

The empty table waited for the food contributions to arrive and Di excelled herself with a very yellow (golden) mango salad

Once the crowd was duly fed and watered, it was time for the task du jour. This year, the building project was a bit more elaborate than in previous years (Sara thought it was time for them to be more challenged and experiment with a few more materials than the spaghetti, rubbers and paddlepop sticks of past years).

This year, there was a full materials list…..

Base & Land

• cardboard sheets
• Foam sheets
• Felt sheets (for “grass”)

Buildings & Structures

• Foam blocks
• Wooden blocks
• DUPLO bricks
• Paper cups
• Toilet rolls
• Large straws
• Lids

Connectors

• Playdough 
• Blu Tack
• Jumbo paper clips
• Rubber bands
• Velcro dots

Decorations

• Pipe cleaners 
• Coloured paper
• Stickers (flowers, stars, numbers, eyes)
• Flags

And the task was to build a retirement village following a layout which Sara had compiled.

Each team had to build 3 parts of the village, and assemble them on the layout map.

This was the entrance

Here are the homes and villas…the red circled bit was their attempt at a 2 storey villa!

Here’s the medical centre… and note the red cross at the top

This was the shopping district…. In one of the shops, you could buy broken up pieces of pipe cleaner!

This was the village square …note the comfy chairs and tree decorations ( Sara lost part of her garden to this!)

In the middle of the task, Les decided he needed some better glasses …

The cafe /dining room was, what can only be described as , minimalist….

By contrast, the craft centre was very well endowed

Despite some initial reservations, they seemed to get into it.

And they were clearly pleased with the final product….

Garry thought it was sooooo good that it deserved to be photographed and entered into “New designs for Retirement villages” magazine.

After an exhausting building project, it was time for more refreshments. Angie questioned why there was so little food on the table… they would all starve!

Then it was time for some quizzes ….

And you can see how seriously they took the quiz task….

Quizmaster Sara had to quell angry responses from the different teams who dared to challenge the answers which chat GPT had given.

All in all, a constructive and entertaining January 1.

By the way, the retirement village was named Pantzerville!