I was just wondering: What is Christmas like in summer Down Under? How is Santa (or Father Christmas? St. Nick?) pictured? Is he still dressed for Winter? Does he have a sleigh or rather a surf board? (The world’s rather northern hemisphere-centric, aren’t we?)
Generally Santa’s still exactly the same, complete with reindeer, snow and fleecy red suit. There are however usually a few store decorations showing more appropriate local guises such as Santa wearing thongs(the Australian version) and (inexplicably) a full body, red, 19th century bathing suit and even occasionally carrying a surfboard.
And of course we have the local flavour of Christmas songs such as Rolf’s classic which were routinely inflicted on us as schoolchildren.
Christmas in Oz is probably more incongruous than Halloween, just that it’s always been done in the northern hemisphere way, and nobody thinks much about it.
The commercial angle is straight out of the Hallmark catalogue. Santa comes from the North Pole, full length red with white fur trimmings, reindeer, elves, sleigh, cotton wool or styrene beads as snow despite maybe only 1% of Australia gets snow even in the winter.
Coming from the inland, Christmas dinner was a fully featured roast, Nan would always insist on at least three different meats, desert was steamed pudding. It seemed to be always about 40C in the shade. There’s usually a total fire ban, so yule logs are out. You don’t see hot rum toddies and egg nogs (sp?)either. We drink cold beer, we aren’t that silly!.
We Aussies are crazy when it comes to Christmas. We walk around in the blazing sun listening to “Winter Wonderland”, and we spray fake snow on our windows. Our Christmas trees have Santa in his hot red suit and snowmen hanging from them. We haven’t evolved our own Christmas yet, we still subscribe to the European vision. It’s traditional, you see.
For years, my family did the whole roast lunch for Christmas, with hot veggies, steamed pudding, custard, the works. Picture everyone sitting around in shorts and singlets, sweat pouring down our faces, tucking into a traditional roast lunch.
Of recent years, we’ve smartened up. We now have cold meats and salads for Christmas lunch and dinner. Sometimes we have a bbq. We tend to sit around a lot, as it’s often 40C (110F, I think) around Christmas. Either that or there’s a storm! I know some families go for a picnic lunch someplace where they can go swimming to cool off.
These days some things are beginning to change, but I think it will be a long time before we let go of the old traditions. Christmas is my favourite time of year - I love the bright and shiny things everywhere. I can imagine how they must brighten up homes in the grip of winter in the Northern Hemisphere.
Check out this website. It tells you more than you could ever want to know about Xmas in Australia.
The OP asked about Santa having a surfboard. If you scroll down the linked page nearly to the bottom, you’ll see that Australia’s 1977 Christmas postage stamp did indeed have a surfing Santa on it.
In my experience, one thing just about every Australian would like to see have just once in their life is a white christmas. I’ve lived outside of Australia for about five years of my adult life (2 in England, 2 in Canada, and 1 in the US, where i am now) but still haven’t been lucky enough to have snow on Xmas day. I suppose i should have lived in Montreal instead of Vancouver. Or maybe i should now move from Baltimore to Boston or, even better, Buffalo.
