The time has come and as with every year I rush to shops to spend my hard earn dollars buying gifts and food and generally attempting not to be caught up in the consumerism and over indulgence breed into us from an early age...
Do you send a card?
As I get older and my children also grow up it does get easier....
There are so many different cultures here in Oz it can be tricky when visiting friends who do not celebrate Christmas to know what to do....
Do you send a card?Do you Give their child a gift?
Invite them to Lunch on Christmas Day?
We tend to invite them to celebrate the Spirit of the Day not the religious tone of it... and celebrate the more Pagan aspects of it as in time with family friends the sharing of meal and general good times... We do make an effort to imcorporate the various cultures of our friends into this special day and our friends also bring with them some of the traditional eats and drinks.... so it becomes a multicultural banquet of sorts....
Do you celebrate Christmas?
And how do you celebrate....
What are your Traditions?
4 comments:
I have a question I have always wanted to ask a resident of the Southern Hemisphere, born of ignorance more than anything else. Tomorrow is the first day of summer for you, while it is the first day of what is turning out to be a very cold, snowy winter here. How do you accommodate all the Northern bias in imagery - the snow, the whole winter thing - in the midst of summer down there?
Merry Christmas to you and yours. Give a thought to some of us who shiver during Christmas. I'll be thinking of you next July as the temperature passes 100 several days in a row. . .
Hi Geoffrey
and a very Merry Christmas to you and yours my friend... I do think of all those shivering away and in some what of envious tone I must admit...
Generally speaking Christmas will be hot everywhere from 30 - 45 degrees C in your scale I think thats about... 75 - 105/110 ..
It is in most homes a day for traditional roasts .. chicken, pork and Ham... others have a BBQ lunch with seafood and Salads, ice Cream and Fruits, stone Fruits etc..
Plenty of beer, soft drink (fizzy stuff) then to the Beach or the pool for the afternoon party...
As far as the imagery goes we do have lots of our own in recent times... Santa in Red Board Shorts and T-Shirt and the Reindeers get a break as he trades them for Six White Boomers (Big Kangaroos)... although the kids ask why does Santa give kids in the snow base ball bats and sprts gear when they cant go outside and use them for 3 months....
Hope that answers your Question... feel free to ask anymore you like....
AC
Actually, that does answer a lot of them. It is nice to know that the ubiquitous "snow, elves, sleigh" business we get handed to us here in the States doesn't travel as well as one might fear.
My wife and I use to live in the near South - the very southern part of the US state of Virginia - and while we did have "winter" of a sorts, it was never as cold or as snowy as we have here on the prairies of Illinois. We only had one Christmas with white stuff, and that was ice and not snow. The temperature was usually in the mid-40's. In fact, the year we had an ice storm on Christmas Eve across Virginia and North Carolina, by the 27th of December, the temperature was in the mid-60's! Yet, Christmas cards across the south all had what appear to me to me New England scenes of snow and rolling hills, small villages with steepled white churches - none of it very, well, Virginian. People took it for a matter of course, rather than considering how it might be creative to create imagery that reflected their own reality.
Enjoy whatever the day brings.
Man - the beach on Christmas day. I think I want to move to Australia.
Hi Aussiecynic,
I'm not a Christian, but xmas is a public holiday, so we sleep late, my kids watch all the xmas cartoons and specials while I like to watch the Tamil movie that's shown.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
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