A Summer Christmas

Festive Christmas Breakfast table. Cupcake centrepiece,
 gold cutlery, hand written name baubles.

It has to be said. For many of us, Christmas is in summer.   For me the first Tuesday in November is the warning bell; the beginning of summer and the gateway to Christmas.   For that is Melbourne Cup Day and the jolting reminder that the end of the year is nigh. What? already? On that warm spring night the golden light starts stretching long shadows at 8pm and I think of sparkling tinsel and fur trees.  Christmas is around the corner.

Thanks to the gold rush, Melbourne was once the largest Victorian era city, outside of London, named after Lord Melbourne in the new colony named for his Queen.  So you don't get too much more Victorian than that.  No wonder then that the full Victorian Christmas tradition transplanted over here amongst the Anglo settlers.  The tradition and the city have pretty much grown up together.



So despite the heat and being totally out of context, the shops are festooned in fake snow, tinsel, lights, the fat red man in a warm red furry suit and all the full northern hemisphere touches. There are a scant few summer based christmas cards and they're usually terrible. The rest depict snow and of course, religion.

8pm Carols Concert Yarraville

The awkward thing about our inherited Christmas traditions is that all of them are about winter, even more than religion.  Ironic that the tradition has become about winter when it's primarily concerning a baby born in the desert. Huh. Does my head in, that.  Colourful lights make sense if it's dark and dank by 4pm.  In the bleak midwinter you need a bit of colour.   But amid the hot summer evenings and sunny blaze we light our houses as the cicadas sing; we send cards with pictures of snowmen on them.  We sing carols about cold and snow, bells and sleighs.  The other night I went to our local community Carols in the Park and Santa was sweltering. We sang all the winter carols sitting there in tee shirts, with sunglasses on as the sun went down,  drinking iced cool drinks and eating ice cream.  The fireworks were lovely - even after waiting until 9.30pm when it was dark enough to have them.

I spent a white Christmas in Cobham, Kent many years ago. It was magical. It was like walking into the perfect Christmas card. Do people really spend every Christmas like this?  Wow! Ten of us were living in a house that was a twelfth century monastery, next door to the  village church, St Mary Magdalene built at a similar time.  Being a group of choristers, we put on a Christmas concert and raised funds for the restoration of the organ. It snowed on Christmas morning.  Then we cooked up a feast.

Through Christmas week we minded a tudor cottage down the road and when the turkey was taking too long to cook in the oven we took it down through the village to cook it at the cottage.  Two people carrying the tray with the turkey in it and one holding an umbrella over the turkey due to the light rain. Sounds like a classic UK village sit com? Yes, we even bumped into the vicar on our way.  Yes, he was on a bike.  Dibley had nothing on us.  I'm hoping that between the concert, the turkey and making the local under 15s football club sick on vegemite sandwiches, that our Christmas there will go down in Cobham folklore... Actually if Richard Curtis needs another idea for a comedy series, tell him to give me a call.  But I digress.

Illuminated Melbourne Town Hall

My point is that since 1788 Australia has been a place of imported culture, in the main and Christmas as one continues to be a very strong one, little changed from the european one.  We have adapted and celebrate a traditional winter festival in summer, the Easter tradition of spring re-birth and renewal in autumn as the heat departs and the leaves start to fall.
So our  season based Christian festivals are all a bit backwards.  Not to worry, a remedy is at hand. For those who wish to celebrate Chrismtas as a winter festival we have "Christmas in July",
No, really, we have that.

Thanks to Matthew Ward (@HistoryNeedsYou)  for this lovely photo.

But when actual Christmas rolls around, although its hot, we can't see the North Star, and our whole tradition is imported from elsewhere,  I still love it.

You may have heard that we throw a prawn on the barbie - don't believe everything you hear.  Many of my friends go the whole hog - or should I say turkey -  and in some cases, goose - with all the roasted trimmings and gravy, pudding, brandy custard, mince pies, uncle- tom cobbley-and-all, and wouldn't have it any other way.



Having experienced this year after year after year it strikes me how genetically embedded and ancestral these traditions are. We may have had 12 or so at most, generations of white people in Australia, but there is something in us, just under the skin that has seen this winter festival for hundreds of years beforehand and somewhere in our genetic material it has stuck, fast.  Perhaps this also has something to do with the Victorian traditions of Christmas still being so strong and little changed. It could be because Christmas is only once per year there has been little time for evolution of the tradition. Since Dickens day there have only been 130 or so Christmases.

No matter where you are throughout Christmas or what tradition you celebrate, have a wonderful season full of family, friends, over indulging and some weird stuff that doesn't always make sense when you think on it.  Oh and, pack sunscreen.