Christmases Past - Part 3
Some Aussie Christmas Trivia
Phase 3, and Five More Facts you Didn’t Know
Christmas is a strange time for me. Although I have always made an effort to make it meaningful, there were quite a few Christmases which I avoided for various reasons. When our children were still very little, my husband died on Christmas Eve. For a while I couldn’t handle Christmas. I celebrated for the children, but I couldn’t bring myself to do this on the 25th. I arranged the celebrations for a another day earlier or later, and one year I spent it with a Jewish friend in Hanukah at the Gold Coast.
But as things healed, I recreated a new version of Christmas customs, which were perhaps more fitting for them as teenagers.
Barbies on Boxing Day and a Ballerina’s Secret
December and January are summer holidays. These days Christmas decorations start to go up in September – none of the restraint that Thanksgiving manages in controlling Christmas til December. So December becomes a month of end of year parties and concerts and graduations, Carols by Candlelight over picnics on grassy lawns under the stars, while organising presents and food and long car trips to be with family spread across the country.
On the 1st of December we put up the Christmas tree and started our schedule of Christmas movies. And I still did a daily advents calendar through December, but with some major differences. I switched it to a morning coffee ritual.
At the time we had a cappuccino machine. With our drinks after breakfast, we had a mini gift giving each day. Each of us would receive a tiny box with a very small and usually silly gift. I sourced most of these over Ebay from China – most of them not even costing a dollar. November would become a month of fun deliveries in anticipation of a month of gift giving. In time all of us shared the tasks, taking turns to fill the mini boxes for everyone.
Mine were often printouts of amigurumi patterns - especially nerdigurumi. My first one was the Starship Enterprise from StarTrek. Mini Tardises from Doctor Who started to decorate our tree, and a few Yodas as well.
We added evening BBQs, tried out beers that came in boxes of 6 from around the world, and on Boxing Day I often cooked some of our favourite Chinese dishes.
But the pre-Christmas box of mangoes was never omitted.
There are a particular variety of mangoes in Australia which are small, yellow, and incredibly sweet – the Kensingtons. They may have originated from the Philippines, but they are available (at an affordable price) where we were living in Australia for just 2 weeks of the year, leading up to Christmas.
I bought them by the box.
22 mangoes for $20. They never went to waste. 2 boxes in 2 weeks – they were fought over!
This is a small box of only 16. I liked the smaller mangoes - they gave me an excuse to have one more often.
Fact 1: Cyclone Tracy
Australia has also had its share of tragedies. A country of bushfires and floods – the biggest bushfires were in 2019-2020, the year I left. As for floods – when it’s not bushfire or drought season, its flood season. A famous poem from Dorothea Mackellar called I love a Sunburnt Country say it all:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains
Of ragged mountain ranges
Of droughts and flooding rains
There must be a Black label for every day of the week – a Black Tuesday, and a Black Wednesday, Black Monday… for a particularly bad day of fires one year or another, and nothing to do with sales. The fires are a seasonal thing with major ones every few years, especially after a period of drought. They are usually started by dry lightening strikes in remote forest areas with dried out undergrowth. Since Australians love to build in bush settings, damage to homes is regularly a problem.
But in the north, there are also tropical cyclones – the southern hemisphere version of typhoons. Most of the time these are not a big deal, simply because there’s nobody up there. Australia has a mostly urban population living on the coastal strip from Brisbane and the gold Coast down through Sydney to Melbourne. Add a small dot around Perth in Western Australia and that’s about it.
But in December 1974 a little but intense cyclone decided to line up with the northern capital of Darwin – spot on Christmas Eve.
A devastated Darwin. Both flattened, and upset.
2 Blitz the Mossies and Blowies and throw some Sangers on the Barbie for Chrissie before we open the Pressies
That translates as “spray the mosquitoes and blowflies, put some sausages on the BBQ for Christmas before opening the presents”. Maybe it’s quaint, maybe just an annoying habit, but Aussies tend to shorten words – maybe just too hot to bother with the full original. Actually these days the BBQ usually means seafood, especially around Christmas. This is nothing like the American BBQ – just a casual backyard affair with friends or family and some beers or a cask of wine (invented in Australia), maybe followed by some backyard cricket.
If you want to get a feel for this, Australia has a unique brand of humour. You can get a taste of that from movies like Backyard Ashes (2013, which starts over the accidental incineration of a neighbour’s cat), an old favourite of mine The Castle (1997, a fight over keeping their home wanted by the airport for extentions), or take in a few episodes of Kath & Kim, where you can pacifically enjoy some cardonay (chardonnay).
A backyard scene from Backyard Ashes. Ashes has a double meaning in the movie - the Ashes which Australia and the UK fight over - a major cricket tournament between the two - and the ashes after a cremation.
3 Christmas is Hot
Most of Australia is very hot in the summer. It’s a time when you learn about towns like Tibooburra in the North-Western corner of New South Wales, which regularly has the highest temperature in NSW, typically in the high 40s in summer: Population – 95, at least it was the last time they counted in 2021. On the other hand, their kangaroo population is around 577,000. David Bowie filmed his song Let’s Dance in a tiny country town like this one, Carinda – which is much closer to the coast than to Tibooburra, at only about 8 hours driving (about 700km/435 miles).
But, it also snows in Australia, and can even do so at Christmas. I had one Christmas when I was about 3 years old when we had snow on Christmas Day, in the Tablelands of northern NSW – about half way between Sydney and Brisbane but inland – on a farm between Ebor and Guyra (Guyra boasts the highest caravan park in Australia). Actually, Australia has decent ski fields, but south of Canberra and in Victoria and Melbourne. While it snows where I grew up, it’s not often, and doesn’t settle for long.
Other treats of Christmas in the summer include the classic Boxing Day Cricket match every year where many recover from Christmas hangovers and excitement watching it on the telly (TV) over a quiet tinnie (tin of beer), and the famous international Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. Starting from Sydney Harbour with a lot of fanfare, it takes about two days to the finishing line in Hobart in Tasmania, and in spite of the season the water can become dangerous if a summer storm blows up – notoriously in 1998.
Start of the Sydney to Hobart on Boxing Day - the Harbour Bridge and Opera House in the background.
4 Carols by Candlelight
Following the lengthening summer days of December, Carols by Candlelight is a great way to spend the evening cool. Families sit on grassy green hillsides, sometimes with picnic dinners. Most songs are the traditional ones. My favourite was always The Little Drummer Boy. But Aussie ones can sometimes be included, such as Six White Boomers, where Santa’s sleigh is led by kangaroos instead of reindeer. Their names are: Jackaroo, Curly, Bluey, Two-Up, Desert-Head and Snow.
· Curly and Bluey are classic Aussie nicknames.
· A jackaroo is a horseback stockman, especially on the huge properties in the centre – the largest property is Anna Creek Station, which is bigger in size than the whole of Belgium. Women are Jilleroos.
· Two-Up is a classic ANZAC day gambling game over tossing a coin.)
For a spin on Christmas entertainment, check out the song White Wine in the Sun by comedian Tim Minchin.
5 And Pavlova
Australia’s traditional Christmas cake is a dark fruit cake – laced, of course. If it’s a fancy version, it’s covered in marzipan and white fondue icing, and maybe even decorated. But over the years a desert has become an essential of the summer Christmas table. That is the pavlova. In December you can now find mountains of them stacked up in their boxes at the supermarket entranceways.
It is a meringue cake – egg whites beaten till stiff, then slowly, slowly add sugar while still beating. That’s about it. Baked in a slow oven at a low temperature til browned on the surface. While meringues are crisp all through, a big volume such as a cake stays soft like mousse in the middle.
The decorations are of ultimate importance – whipped cream all over the top, and then fruit, essentially passionfruit pulp! After that, kiwi fruit, strawberries and summer berries are most typical, but any fruit goes. The passionfruit and unsweetened cream balance the intensely sweet of the meringue – not something lightly stomached by all.
The pavlova was created by a famous chef in Perth in honour of the famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova who toured Australia and New Zealand in the 1926s. But here is where it gets interesting. A fact that I only came across a few years ago is that those Kiwis also claim it was invented, but by them by a chef in Wellington – an ongoing rivalry between Aussies and Kiwis.
(Of course, the real truth is, the Kiwis have just hijacked the idea. It was always an Aussie invention.)
Just missing kiwi fruit.