White Christmas
by Myrrhine
Every year, around about the beginning of December, the Christmas carols start to appear on the radio, in elevators, piped through instore speakers. Inevitably White Christmas pops up, and why not, it's a beautiful song.
The thing is, I live in a place where the only thing white about Christmas is the glare of the sun bouncing off the beach to dazzle you when as you make your way into the waves in an effort to cool off. Growing up in Australia, my childhood was spent trying to work out why we all gave each other cards with pictures of falling snow, reindeer, and other wintery things and sang songs which didn't really describe my experience of Christmas.
How peculiar.
For many years my family celebrated a traditional European Christmas. My grandmother ruled the roost and declared it just wasn't Christmas unless we, the women of the family, sweated away in the kitchen, slaving over a roast joint of meat and baked in the weeks leading up to Christmas all manner of food which is delicious and warming in winter but weighs you down like a lead balloon in high summer. We put candles in her tree but could only light them temporarily in case the whole lot caught fire, the tree being dry and brittle and Christmas tending to fall on days of total fire ban anyway. Enough was enough.
My mother snapped one day in mid December. She would never again get up in the wee small hours of the morning in an effort to get the turkey cooked before the kitchen overheated. We would no longer sit around the formal dining table in uncomfortable clothes enjoying each other's company but feeling the hot and sweaty while we did it. No we needed a new Christmas regime.
Our table is now a rug on the lawn, out in the backyard under a couple of large umbrellas to keep the sun off burnable noses. We have been known to hang the odd bauble off the gum tree in the front yard, no fir needles dropping all over the floor for us anymore. We stuff ourselves with prawns and crawfish, smoked salmon and salad, finish the meal with icecream and fruit salad and laze in the sun when we're done. If food must be cooked it is done on the barbeque where the men can gather and wave the tongs around to enhance the drama of the story they are obliged to tell while the coals get hot.
But some things never change and my grandmother still insists on listening to her favourite carols and Christmas songs - among them White Christmas - and we don't begrudge her that in the slightest.
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