Christmas here in Sharm can be a little bit of a challenge. We have two aspects here, firstly we live in a country where Christmas is not traditionally celebrated, so work-wise it is bizarrely “business as usual” with many dive centres and shops open as normal. We also often find that some of the guests who come out at this time of year, actually want to avoid the whole Christmas scenario entirely. Of course many of our guests thankfully come out here for a unique celebration, and some to join us in our celebrations.

Needless to say, we all enjoy Christmas, so endeavour to do our utmost to celebrate it as best we can.

This year I was working on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, although the latter, I found myself doing a Discover Scuba Course meaning that I was done by lunchtime…

Christmas Eve was great fun, I was teaching a couple of friends of mine on a speciality course, who bizarrely I taught to dive on Christmas Day four years ago, when I was a relative newbie! We had a fun day, but what made it the most fun was the fact that at lunchtime, a baby shark turned up at the back of our boat!!! A baby white tip oceanic! How cool was that? There was a diver still on the ladder right by it, and he got a great look at the shark, until it got just a little too curious for his liking! I have never seen someone fly up a ladder quite that quickly. The shark hung around entertaining everyone for a good ten minutes or so, before heading off into the blue. We were on Middle Garden, a location where shark sightings are really not to be expected at all!

Then to make our day even better, a huge eagle ray turned up on our afternoon dive. It had a couple of remoras stuck to it, and was trying to shake them off, which was great to watch. Then after a couple of minutes, off he flew off, again into the blue. What a great day.

This was topped off with our Christmas party.. as a multinational group we celebrate both European and British Christmasses here, so Christmas Eve is our first “family” party. Each person had cooked something, George spicy roast potatoes and me bread sauce and steamed brussel sprouts… nothing was missed out, we had pigs in blankets (no pork in sight of course) a huge roast turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, roast and steamed veggies, bread sauce and not to forget the gravy.. hmmmm. And Santa was not missed out, Disco Dave donned the costume and dished out our secret santa gifts.. not sure that some of them were that secret by the end of the evening hehe.

Christmas Day was fun too. The morning bit wasn’t, as I had a seven o’clock pick up (ouch.. getting up at 6am after our Christmas party was a challenge) but once I had had a cuppa, all was fine. We had a few presents around our dinky tree, so hubbie and I opened them up together, then it was off to work for us both.

I had a group of three teenagers for a Discover Scuba Diving course. Well one was eleven, but he was as tall as me, so kind of counts as a teen in my book. All three did really well, and we had an awesome dive. I will not forget the 11 year old’s eyes lighting up when we found nemo nestled in an anenome towards the end of our dive. We also had a huge shoal of Spanish Mackerel swirling around in a baitball.. very cool stuff for all of us.

Once the dives were logged and certificates handed out, we were off for a quick Christmas nip in T2 our favourite bar in Sharm. There we wished our mate Monty a very Happy Christmas before heading off to our own Christmas dinner on our friends’ balcony overlooking the bay, bathed in glorious (and quite hot for this time of year) sunshine! By the end of the day, we had had more than enough food and wine for one day, and managed to have a particularly lovely Christmas.

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