There's still time to enter my Mad Blogs competition, but I have to put this post up before Christmas while it's still relevant...
So I was just thinking about the difference between American Christmas and Aussie Christmas.
As I remarked on Simon's blog, when he was sent an Aussie Christmas card,
Awww, an Aussie Christmas.
You just want to eat nice cold leg ham, prawns and salad because it's so effing hot, but you have to also have a turkey and a lead-weight pudding because it's just not Christmas without inappropriately hot European foods.
Christmas in the Southern hemisphere, of course, is in the middle of summer, and in Australia, it is quite often the high point of bushfire season*.
One year the bushfires were particularly bad and their effects were noticeable even far away in the city. We ate Christmas lunch under a blood-red sun which hung sullenly in the grey, ash-choked sky. The wind carried little flakes of ash that fluttered onto our plates, disintegrating at the touch.
It was like gathering at the end of the world.
*Similar to wildfires in California. In fact, the increase in wildfires in California in recent years has been attributed by some to the popularity of eucalyptus or gum trees (native to Australia) which are chock full of eucalyptus oil and therefore extremely flammable. I don't know if this is true or not, but it sounds about right.
