We all like to take a break this time of year, but when you're a politician, especially a high ranking one who is the CEO of New Zealand then you really need to learn to read the room - but instead this coalition has shown again that they have no real understanding of what it means to lead Aotearoa New Zealand.

**This one is going to be best in video form, which you can find on YouTube, Facebook or Tik Tok

Sharks smiling in the waters of Kawhia and on the front page of the Herald, only one of them in matching $129 per pair pyjama sets is how my Christmas day started.

But it was a great day full of aroha and whanau on the last day of our Paul... On Tour Road trip - a road trip that took us 1800kms, from MIddle Earth to Ammity Island, via the beehive, Mt Doom, through our most important historical moments - and through it all was one thing that kept bugging me... The haircuts.

In 1986 in an act of pettiness we should all strive to emulate, the town of Otorohanga changed its name in support of a local business being sued by British-Egyptian Business magnate, Mohammed Al-Fayed, the owner of the British store Harrods.

This year I spent Christmas Eve there, and the town could totally give any big city service experience a run for its money...

Trying to have a down time day just before Christmas - so of course the Trolls come out online - as "freedom" group Let Kids Be Kids, discover a video from early December calling out NZ First for celebrating the removal of RSE in schools.

Out come the illegal Wellington protestors, with their thinly veiled homophobia, their evidence free claims of grooming and political pay offs and the stalking by their members.

You know, totally normal behaviour...

In 2021, Tom Phillips disappeared twice into the bush around Marakopa with his three children. Since then there have been sporadic sightings, a dramatic car chase and an unclaimed $80'000 reward.

And where I'm staying right now, which has family links to the case, well everyone has a theory about the truth, or whatever constitutes it. And locally, it seems we're seeing the birth of a mythological folk hero - the man who took his kids and hid to save them from the modern world of woke indoctrination...

Let's talk icons.

In Ohakune I kept being told I NEEDED to try Johny's Eclairs because they're iconic.

In Taumarunui, the town made iconic by a folk song about it's place on the main trunk line, sung by the likes of Former Prime Prime Minister Mike Moore and When the Cats are Spayed.

In Otorohanga our most iconic indigenous animal is bred, studied and can be seen - and it turns out we didn't know very much about it just 40 years ago - and my own Grandmother had a small part in teaching us more about the bird we consider an icon for us all...

The signs of vandalism from easily fooled, happily criminal conspiracy theory rabbit hole believers is evident on the motorway North from Wellington, but at least Ohakune seems like a bit of an oasis from that...

It's Kai time - with a catch up with Blake Forbes, a cancelled catch up with the Mayor and dinner with family who work in the civil service... and the tea of it all...

*Not really

But I did see it, and our other constitutional taonga - and had no idea how easy it was to get in to and you can do it too!

The Kiwi Burger is back - and so to is a government caused recession based on punitive mismanagement of the economy!