By Mick Le Moignan
I don’t like to gloat (much), but this is a time when I’m happy to miss Jersey’s winter for Australia’s summer. It’s not just the weather – well, of course, 20-30°C is preferable to 0-10°C, but I do enjoy the Australian approach to celebrating Christmas and the arrival of another new year. It’s a source of much fun and fascination.
Ex-pat Brits like to observe that ‘it doesn’t feel like Christmas’ and I’ve never been quite sure what they mean. I think they’re trying to say the European culture of Christmas is somehow alien to this environment, like an exotic shrub that won’t be transplanted and refuses to thrive.
If so, it’s not for want of trying. There are more fake snowflakes, jingling bells, jolly Santas, red-nosed Rudolphs, unmeltable snowmen, perky robins, tinsel, trees and tacky greeting cards over here than you’d find in Ebenezer Scrooge’s worst nightmare. The Dickensian Christmas hasn’t gone away: it has moved Down Under.
Thousands of households spend thousands of dollars on complex, dazzling lighting displays that take weeks to assemble. They have to be bigger and better each year, in the spirit of neighbourly competition.
Most Sydney suburbs have one street where just about every house gets in on the act: I’m not sure whether people move to those streets because they aspire to putting Santa’s name and image up in lights, or if they contract the infection after moving in – I suspect the few houses that stay dark in December in these areas are empty or for sale.
Teams of reindeer haul Santa’s sleigh across snowy rooftops. Sacks of toys spill gaudy presents down the walls. Fat Santas climb long ladders up to fake chimneypots. Flowerbeds are filled with sparkling fairies casting spells in elfin grottoes. And there is sound and movement: I saw one display where a train, tooting its horn, appeared to race across the landscape, over a bridge and then vanished into a misty mountain pass, before repeating the ghostly journey, just a few seconds later.
The displays are irresistible. Like our neighbours, while professing disinterest in such crass ostentation, we drive under cover of darkness to our local lighting hotspot to see what new, outrageous kitsch the householders have created for us, this year. It’s like the Battle of Flowers on steroids.
My favourite display ever was put on, three years ago, by a rebellious resident whose house simply displayed a two-word sign in plain, bright, white light, reading ‘Bah, humbug!’ I’ve written about this one before, but I think it deserves an encore.
The warm-up for Christmas begins soon after the running of the Melbourne Cup, on the first Tuesday in November. People begin winding down work projects, tradies start saying they’re sorry, they couldn’t really fit you in for that maintenance job until ‘after the holiday’, in January, by which they mean February or March, or maybe just after Easter. The strains of ‘It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas’ ring out in shopping malls and supermarkets and huge piles of dry panettone and pavlova bases appear. I have no idea who buys or eats them all, but there are only a few left ‘on special’ by New Year’s Eve.
It’s as if, deprived of the cold days, long nights and slushy streets that signify Christmas in Europe, Australians try all the harder to generate a fantasy Christmas, just like they have in what no one any longer calls ‘the old country’ – because, for most Australians, it’s not. So why is there this strange obsession with an ancient ritual from afar?
I understand why the shopkeepers like the idea: it’s a terrific excuse to sell people all sorts of kitsch, plastic bric-a-brac that wouldn’t merit a second glance, in the other 11 months of the year. They promote the American, post–Thanksgiving, selling extravaganza ‘Black Friday’ for all it’s worth, and then try to keep the shopping frenzy pumped up all the way through December. Several businesses, bookshops included, make over half their annual sales in this month.
But why do we fall for their pitch? What’s in it for us is a long holiday, lasting several weeks, from Christmas parties in early December right up to and past Australia Day on 26 January – after which, to the palpable relief of parents across this wide, brown land, ‘the schools go back’ and peace descends on backyard swimming pools.
It’s hard to believe the way normally frugal people will splash out on extravagances, just because it’s that time of year again – but, as the Queen of Hearts boasts to Alice, in Through the Looking Glass, ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’
‘The Christmas Story’ has always been the ultimate test of our credulity, ever since the Angel Gabriel announced the astonishing news of the impending virgin birth to Mary and Joseph. I don’t think the Bible tells us the reactions of Mary’s parents: perhaps Gabriel called by to reassure them, as well.
Then there is the old man from the North Pole, flying through the night sky on his sleigh, dispensing gifts and delighting millions of under-tens by filling their stockings at the speed of light… Why ever not, if we’re collecting impossible things to believe in?
Don’t let me spoil the fun by being a grouchy ‘doubting Thomas’: this is a time of year for dispensing with reason and relying on faith, which is, after all, a blind belief without any rational basis in reality. We tell each other: ‘It’s only once a year, isn’t it?’ We can go back to being sensible, once the holiday’s over, in January, or maybe February, when the tradies go back to work, or after Easter, when there may well be even more surprising news to celebrate…
