a sunshine-y kind of un-christmas

a southern hemisphere celebration

Dec 20, 2023

Christmas is fast approaching. It does this every year. One moment we are deep in spooky season and the next everything is tinsel and reindeer and the jolly fat man. Christmas isn’t just a day – it's a whole season. A season of excess, of stress, of bad music. And if you’re lucky it’s a season of joy, and gratitude and family.

I am definitely one of the lucky ones.

Christmas in Australia is something else. It is so unlike the Christmas I knew as a child. It’s hot and bright. The days are long. And we are alone. Well not alone. I’ve always had my parents and my brother. But there’s no traditional Christmas dinner at my Nan’s with all my aunts and uncles and my cousins. There’s no sledding down the back lane. There are no frost bitten noses. There’s no snow angels – no snow at all.

I was horrified to learn that Christmas was often spent at the beach. AT THE BEACH! What blasphemy. I have opinions about sand, the texture is a sensory nightmare and I still can’t bear to have the stuff on my hands. It was a very hard sell for my parents that first Christmas here. My mother did her best, but it just wasn’t the same. Christmas just felt like any other day - a hot, sweaty, miserable day.

It was the first time I understood homesickness. The bone deep longing for the place you are not. A pit would open in my stomach on December 1^st and leave me feeling hollow until new years. I found some solace in Christmas movies, in American fantasies of snow and tradition and magic. It’s harder to believe in magic in the harsh unrelenting summer sun.

It took awhile but slowly I have come around to an Australian Christmas. For our little family it meant drinking beers in the pool, doing karaoke and eating cold meat and cheese. The four of us would lounge about the house in various states of undress as we read, or played with whatever new contraption we had bought for each other. My Nan has sent us presents every Christmas for 23 years. They are usually crap, so crap in fact that we play a game of whoevers is worst wins.

But it doesn’t matter.

Christmas also meant an open door at our house. We have hosted many orphans over the years. Friends of my brothers, travellers, work colleagues, any one that didn’t have anywhere to go was welcome.

Over the years my relationship with Christmas has ebbed and flowed. Some years I have reverted to a forced sense of childhood wonder. Others I have let the season pass with little to no note at all.

Christmas has never felt the same as the ones I remember as a child. There is something unattainable, something intangible that is missing. I can’t name it, but its absence a presence all it’s own. But nowadays the ache is a little less - the longing is a little less. I have come to love the heat and the way my skin starts to brown. I love lying next to my mother on the sun loungers reading. I love spending the day with my dad - hearing him reminisce about Wales. I love calling my Nan and thanking her for my gift.

And this year Christmas is changing again. New traditions are being formed in the face of an expanding family. This year I will have three Christmas’s to attend, one for my parents and two for my boyfriends family. It is hectic, and different to what I have known, but I can’t help but feel grateful. After all these years, Christmas feels less lonely, we are less alone.

Our little family is growing. And Christmas feels a little bit more magical for it.