CHRISTMAS STUFFING.

Santa After Christmas Stuffing

Why do we wish each other "Happy Christmas" as if there is some doubt it will happen;  a fifty percent chance of it going awry?

Chances are it will.  There is so much expectation surrounding the enjoyment of the day; so much negotiation between couples as to whose family to visit when and for which meal.  There are definite odds of a stomach ache following a self-induced stuffing that would, were the turkey still alive, make it feel a lot better about what's been done to it.

I haven't put up a Christmas tree since my son moved into his own home.  For many years now the thought of Christmas approaching has filled me with a foreboding much akin to someone facing execution.  When the Christmas trees go up in shops two months ahead of December I begin to get aggro.

This year I am mending my ways and attempting good cheer.  I decided I was only making myself miserable.  There may be a reason for my attitude.  I have the rare honour of having been being born on Christmas Eve.  As a child I felt, and still do, rather special.  No one forgets my birthday.  When I was very young other children envied me because I had presents to open the day before they did.  Then I had more to open on Christmas Day.

I do remember the sheer joy Christmas arouses in every child.  As adults it is our duty to give our own children that thrill, even though it has passed for many of us.  I rather admire adults who still approach Christmas with that thrill intact.  I don't know what's wrong with them, but I wish I had some.

It must be lovely to be in a cold country at Christmas.  Down Under we insist on eating a hot Christmas lunch when we are hotter than the food.  Kitchens reach Hades-like temperatures as hams are glazed, turkeys and chickens roasted, oven vegetables turned and browned, gravy simmered on the stove, plum pudding warmed over a steamer and custard in a Bain Marie.  The sheer logistics of this exercise rivals an army's preparations to invade an enemy country.

When finally we sit to eat we take time to view the overladen table and realise, with sinking hearts and perspiration dripping from our foreheads, that it is our duty to force feed ourselves, even if moving on to another family feast for dinner.  It is as if we a geese being force fed in preparation for our livers being harvested for foie gras.

There is something exhausting about eating a meal with numerous relatives and friends.  There are too many people to serve the food on plates in the kitchen so everything is placed on the table and the dishes passed around as people fill their plates.  Christmas bonbons must also be pulled apart and toasts made.  The food may have been hot when it left the kitchen but is now cooling just to the point of encouraging salmonella.

Christmas Day in Australia is quite often a heatwave no matter in which capital city you live.  I grew up in Sydney and a Christmas heatwave always finished with a Southerly Buster.  At around four p.m. ominous black clouds would blow in from the south accompanied by torrential rain, lightening and thunder.  The temperature would plummet to a delicious cool.

One of the things that brings on a Christmassy feeling in me is the sound of cicadas.  Their song fills the air in the month leading up to Christmas, their throbbing chorus pulsating  in air that vibrates with heat. They are The Little Drummer Boys of an Australian Christmas.

I blame the British for the way we celebrate Christmas in Australia.  At the peak of their power I'm sure they deliberately set out to colonise every hot, inhospitable place on earth just to escape the cold and damp of home.  I damn them for this as I have purely Anglo-Saxon ancestors who all conspired to come to Australia and, over time, combined to make me.  They must have liked the heat and isolation.  I do not.  I am a post-penal prisoner of this country.  Had I had a choice, I would have been born in the south of France or even Italy.

But here I am stuck when others still come voluntarily; immigrants and refugees from Abidjan to Zaire come to this wide, open and hot country.  They have brought with them their cuisines.  The Australian palate has changed so much in forty years it is now truly international.  Except at Christmas when it reverts, like a recessive gene, to traditional British fare.  It is as if the Union Jack is stuck in our gullet, which is much the way we feel on Boxing Day.

I miss a Christmas full of people; the ones I had as a child.  I married and moved with my husband to where work took him.  Our son grew up only occasionally knowing the kind of big family Christmases his parents had enjoyed.  When my husband and I divorced, our son's Christmases became smaller still.

I feel I've let him down but now he is married to a girl with a large family and they are making their own happy Christmases.  I must say they do it with a vengeance.  Now with a baby son, they deluge each other and the family in gifts.  I feel like an outsider, but I'm happy he has an extended family now.  He missed it for so long.

The worst Christmas of all is the lonely one.  There are so many who would give anything to be a part of the chaos of a family Christmas.  I've had my share of these.  Such people aren't alone in being alone.  They are a kind of family in their own right.  For the rest of the year, the lonely can cope with it but on that particular day it becomes so much harder.

So enjoy your 'stuffed to the gunnels' Christmas.  Revel at the aches in your stomachs and heads.  You have done Christmas proud and those aches are much better than the pangs of loneliness.  I guess that's what Christmas is all about, and a lot of stuffing.

END