A real Christmas

A Real Christmas.

It is getting warm. The trees are blossoming and red tulips and yellow daffodils are up everywhere.
It is weird weather here. One day it can be as hot as a Whangarei December. The sun block is out and the kids are wishing we had a pool. The next day there is a snow storm.
A few weeks ago we had a run of warm definitely spring weather. I got all inspired and designed Christmas tree angles, Christmas stockings and was working out a suitable Christmas present for my sister-in-law. Suddenly it occurred to me just because summer was on the way, doesn’t mean Christmas was. Christmas had come and gone.
Last December I had been looking forward to the experience of a Northern Hemisphere Christmas. I thought of all those picturesque cards of snow covered houses, mistletoe and carol singers muffled up It seemed so romantic and made New Zealand Christmases seem rather second rate. . The English books of my childhood painted Christmas in such glowing images. The fact that all our English friends HATE New Zealand hot Christmases and ran mid winter Christmases added to my anticipation of experiencing a REAL Christmas.
Christmas day turned out to be an anticlimax.
We had just arrived in Colorado and were house-sitting for some friends in the Rocky Mountains. It snowed all day, the coveted white Christmas.
We had been invited to some friends house for Christmas dinner but there was no way we were going anywhere without a four wheel drive. We ate a strange scratched together Christmas dinner of ham, fruit, ice cream and oats. (Oats fill up gaps, very important on a student budget.)
In spite of our inability to get out we did have visitors. There were great big black birds that swooped onto the long tube like bird feeder hanging outside the front door. And Squirrels that scampered along the deck railing, up the tree and down the string of the same bird feeder. Mummy Daddy and Baby deer who reared up on hind legs and nibbled off the (you guessed it) the same fast food canteen. We left a bit of Christmas ham outside for the resident fox that lives in the deck foundations.
While it was a peaceful family day it certainly didn’t match up to all those rosy ideals of carolers, roaring fires roast chestnuts and friends.
It didn’t seem like Christmas at all. I missed the hot weather, sounds of cicadas and the option of traipsing off to the beach .Of steaks on the BBQ, blooming hydrangeas and the sounds of kids riding their new bikes up and down the street.
I missed the red halo of the pohutakawa tree on the corner of our road, kids on the trampoline, strawberry and kiwi fruit topped pavlova and long cool glasses of L and P. The walk to church in the morning and the smell of hot tar on the road as the day heated up. I missed the sound of the Salvation Army tooting away on the back of an old Bedford truck and the sight of children running barefoot over the vivid green grass.
The pretty traditional Christmas is overrated if you ask me. Send me Santa-reclining-in-a-beach-chair Christmas cards from now on.
I got out my sketch book and started designing New Zealand Christmas quilts. Give me sandmen not snowmen reindeers cooling off with ice creams and Santa in his togs at the beach.
It’s got me thinking of inviting my neighbors in July to a midsummer Christmas. The beach is many thousands of miles away but it will be hot. We could pull out the BBQ and there will be plenty of bugs like sand-flies. I could hang up some Christmas lights outside and put a manger on the front lawn. We won’t have the Salvation Army or the old Bedford truck but we could have the girls on the violins and me on the guitar. We could sing carols and our kids could run barefoot and shock all the American parents and the German family across the road. Perhaps I could draw Christmas cards of Santa crawling up chimneys of upside down houses after all this will be a Down Under celebration.
Let’s forget about the snow and the holly, “bring out the pav instead, we want to show yooall a REAL Christmas”.