Christmas Aussie-style Part I

Having accepted the invitation to join this blog, I suppose I’d better write something. But what do you write when you’re allowed to write anything at all? That intimidated me for a few minutes, but not having anything in particular to write about has never stopped me before, so why should it now?

The thing is, I’m in rather august company, so I feel I have to lift my act at least a little. However, it’s morning here, and I’m not at my best in the morning. That’s my excuse today anyway.

All this talk of snow and icicle lights makes me feel underprivileged. Australia doesn’t have snow at Christmas (not much of Australia has snow any time). Everything is hot hot hot. And we don’t have the bewildering variety of lights Beth describes. I’m just going to string those pretty little round ‘fairy lights’ (that’s what I call them anyway) on the real tree on our front verandah. All they can do is blink … in unison. Sometimes they forget to do that and all we get is a steady light. They’re pretty old, so I guess a steady light is quite an achievement.

Usually I don’t put any other decorations on the tree. When it comes to Christmas trees (but nothing else) I’m a minimalist.

I haven’t put the lights on the tree yet. To tell you the truth I don’t know where they are. This happens every year. They’re probably in one of the multitude of boxes under the house, but not the one that says ‘Christmas decorations’. I’ve been fooled by the label many times before. Hopefully we’ll find the lights before Christmas Eve. We’ve told ourselves it’s a family tradition to put the lights on the tree on Christmas Eve – before we go to midnight Mass at the wonderful nominally-Catholic but really non-denominational St Mary’s church at South Brisbane.

Our other family Christmas tradition is to leave the Christmas cards strung up in our living room till December the following year.

It’s good to have a tradition or two, don’t you think?

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