Christmas in the Countries
When I was five my family emigrated from Britain to Australia, and Christmas was never the same again. Being people for whom the holidays meant chestnuts roasting on open fires and Jack Frost nipping at the nose, my parents found the concept of Christmas in the middle of summer perverse and difficult to take.
Other Australians of European extraction who had been there for longer had adapted, capturing the Antipodean yuletide vibe by injecting equal measures of irony and alcohol, changing the words to Christmas carols, dressing Santa in red, fur-trimmed shorts, and decorating plastic trees with red-and-green, stuffed koalas and kangaroos. Operating on the reasonable assumption that few people want to eat, much less roast, a turkey with all the trimmings when the temperature outside is frightful (i.e. in the hundreds), most Australians—a pretty secular lot at any time of year—tended to mark the birth of their Saviour by stringing some tinsel over the barbecue, stuffing themselves with chilled seafood and nearly-frozen beer, then going to the beach.
My homesick English mother was having none of that. She isn’t a fan of the heat at the best of times, so at Christmas she looked about as comfortable as a penguin in Palm Springs. Refusing to acknowledge the climatic reality, she would labor over roast turkey, bread stuffing, plum pudding, brandy butter, mince pies, and other core-temperature-raising delicacies designed to stop English people from freezing to death but unsuitable for consumption before a drunken game of tennis in the blazing sun.
In the seventies there were plenty of English expats moving to Australia, and mostly it didn’t seem to take us long to start calling it home. But bring on Christmas and you never saw such homesick people. Because as much as the English love to complain about English weather, at Christmas they missed it horribly. Worse, as if the unrelenting heat wasn’t enough, there was the ritual humiliation of The Ashes—the traditional cricket test match played between England and Australia every Boxing Day, during which the Australian cricket team routinely clobbered their former English overlords at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Eventually it got too much, and twice during our upbringing my parents’ longing for “a proper Christmas” won out against financial prudence and we all went home.
With a few exceptions (incessant rain, a beloved dog, accidentally treading on the next-door-neighbors’ pet hamster), I don’t remember much from the time before my family left England. But the memories of those Christmas trips back to the old country are indelible—after the long flights, the emergence into the perpetual foggy twilight that envelops London in December; the train ride out of the city into the frozen countryside; and over everything the cracking, exhilarating cold. Finally, the ecstatic arrival at the grandparents’ house—a vision of golden warmth, blazing fires and rich scents emanating from a steamy kitchen.
There were snow-covered fields to roam, a frozen lake nearby for skating, and a real Christmas tree that, to a nine-year-old boy at least, seemed twenty feet tall.
Then there was Christmas dinner. Although she wasn’t above roasting a turkey, my grandmother’s favorite thing to do was to get hold of a fat goose, which she would stuff with chestnuts and prunes, then serve with lashings of flavorsome gravy. There would be candles and spiced wine; paper party hats and Christmas crackers; acres of side dishes; little golden fruit mince piece to eat with sweet cream; and finally, a homemade plum pudding carried reverently to the table, doused with warm brandy and set alight to a chorus of ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs.’ Afterwards the grownups would loll about drinking more brandy by the fire while kids and cousins were dressed up like Eskimos and sent outside to lose our new toys in the snow. Remembered now, the whole experience is etched so brightly against the bleak winter landscape, so different from my Australian frame of reference and yet containing many of the elements recreated by my homesick parents in their adopted homeland. The same traditions drawn bigger, brighter, and somehow more real.
Fast forward fifteen years, and there I went emigrating a second time, to a part of Louisiana where English ancestry is common and the Christmas traditions of my wife’s Louisiana farming family bear many hallmarks of their Scots/Irish ancestry. It might not snow much here; but there’re plenty of elements that echo the English Christmases of my childhood. There’s always a fire in the fireplace, a turkey on the table, and a real, fragrant fir tree in the living room. And did I mention that grits and grillades for breakfast is the best invention ever? (Thank you, Cajuns.) As for the Australian element: there might not be any tinsel on my barbecue yet, but no one protests the presence of a small, stuffed green kangaroo on the top of our Christmas tree. At the end of this, our thirtieth year in print, thanks again and always for being part of Country Roads. Happy holidays, and we’ll see you in 2014.