Christmas Down Under

Question: What's wrong with this mental image?

Father Christmas is sitting in a shopping centre, surrounded by lights, tinsel, trees, presents and a queue of adults and their children. A little boy climbs up onto Santa's lap and .... Yes that part's clearly wrong. But also - the boy is wearing a t-shirt, shorts and sandals. And so is his Dad. And so is everyone else in the shopping centre. Apart from the ones wearing dresses or skirts that is. Welcome to Christmas in the middle of summer.

So after almost a week of lounging around, eating too much and cultivating the sort of rotund figure that only Santa would be proud of, it's time to tell you all about our upside down Christmas, a.k.a. Christmas in Australia.

It has to be said that crimbo caught me unawares this year. It's been a year now since I was last corrupting the minds of innocent young kiddiewinks and, without the weeks and weeks of tortuous school xmas play rehearsals in front of a head teacher looking like they've chewed a wasp, I'd sort of forgotten about the whole thing. In spite of the Christmas trees and fake snow all over the place, the weather was all wrong and it took a while to realise that I would have to take some drastic action over prezzies I had to send to the UK. Thank God for Amazon and the fact that my family likes books!

Our day started with prezzie opening and suitable admiration for my family's ingenuity in (a) finding flat yet thoughtful presents to send and (b) planning ahead enough to buy and send them in time for crimbo. Diver Dave had made me a beautiful emerald and white gold ring (see www.davidfrithjewellery.com if you'd like one too!) which I showed my Dad on Skype, then had to explain that it really was only a Christmas present! So all our presents were duly appreciated and tried on before 8 am, including the surprisingly rude looking M&S pants my Mother had sent. Then we had to throw ourselves into action before the rest of Christmas arrived. Starting with the turkey fight.

We'd decided to host a waifs and strays xmas for other poms not with their families, plus a few bemused aussies. So with poms in mind, we had a traditionally Blighty xmas; roast turkey, sprouts (yuk), the works. Thankfully, the weather was pretty miserable so not only did it stop us overheating with the turkey, but it stopped us feeling homesick too! We solved the usual pom problem of not having enough room in the oven by cooking the turkey and roast spuds on the barbie with the lid down. Our aussie friends had hopefully brought some salad and prawns (not for the barbie!) as this is what most aussies eat on xmas day in the height of summer. It hadn't escaped my notice that the fish counter had doubled in size recently at Woolies but I wasn't sure how to combine it with roast turkey and stuffing. So I ignored it. And it looked like the other poms didn't know what to do with it either.

By early evening it looked like one or two guests had had rather a lot to drink, judging by the amount of utter toss they were talking. I had stopped running about with the hoover/dirty dishes/clean dishes and wanted to watch some proper xmas telly. Unfortunately, I was in Australia. After attempting to watch some Courtney Cox dross for half an hour or so, my sofa mate Sal and I gave up and paid Austar to show us Hot Fuzz on their Box Office channel. So there.

Next day, our remaining guests and we made up for all the crap telly that had been on by spending a full day in front of episode after episode of Only Fools and Horses on so called UKTV, followed by almost as many episodes of Extras.

So really the only difference in Christmasses between Oz and Blighty was cooking the turkey and roasties in the barbie, the motley assortment of guests and the fact that we were all sitting at the table outside. And, according to Diver Dave, Father Christmas is still the same down under except he's got a 4x4 and a hydration pack. Christmas telly was still crap - just a more cornea shattering form of crap than the norm in Blighty.