Australia's transplanted Christmas will never stop being surreal
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Version 0 of 1. One artefact of the disappearance of the belief in magic (and for many of us, God) is the form of modern childhood. Adults, almost in a panic, try to cram our early years with the supernatural. They need to strike while we still have the capacity to sustain a belief in a world that’s not purely rational. Santa Claus is a way to enjoy this before we emerge into the grey, melancholy landscape beyond childhood, defined by instrumental reason and the market. In contrast to almost all of our ancestors, Santa is the first and last magical being that many of us will believe in. At some point, however, the magic stops. I remember my moment. I was five or six, living in the tropics, and I wouldn’t see snow for another 15 years or so. Still, I suspected that it had some connection with water. My parents overplayed their hand. When I woke up Christmas morning, they told me to run out to the front stairs to see the snow Santa’s sleigh had left behind. There was a sprinkling of something white on the veranda and top steps, which were already baking in the morning sun. I put my finger in some, drew it to my face, and smelled. It was talcum powder. The jig was up, and from there everything unravelled. I played along for a couple of years, but in the knowledge that I was no more likely to see a reindeer in North Queensland than a martian. Perhaps Australian children are susceptible to Christmas disenchantment earlier than their counterparts in the northern hemisphere, because in late December the entire iconography of the holiday is wildly implausible. The evergreens and holly come to us from pre-Christian, European, pagan celebrations of midwinter, and the rebirth of the sun. The sun in Australia is in aggressive good health at Christmas time, and no amount of spray-on snow or plastic wreaths can change that. Department store Santas seem hale enough when the air conditioning is pumping, but it’s not hard to see that they’d pass out given ten minutes in the car park. As well as magical beings, kids are required to visualise the alien landscape they emerge from. The weirdness of transplanted northern Christmas celebrations in Australia might be the reason for all those fitful, doomed attempts to retrofit European traditions for local use. Rolf Harris’s song, Six White Boomers, addresses the summer heat head-on, with kangaroos replacing reindeer at the head of Santa’s sleigh on his “Australian run”. It was a minor hit in Australia on release in 1961 (a disappointing follow-up to Harris’s cheesy, racist hit from the previous year, “Tie me Kangaroos Down, Sport”), but it endured in ABC songbooks and official Christmas celebrations. It’s a terrible, mawkish song, and as an attempt at re-enchantment, is equal parts jocularity and desperation. But as always, we take what we can get, where we can find it. Now that Harris has been jailed as a pedophile, it’s likely to pass from the rich canon of Australian Christmas kitsch. Not so the Santa suits with red and white-trimmed shorts, the snowmen made of sand, and the tinsel trees. Partly, of course, the traditions survive because Christmas is a global orgy of consumption that Australia can’t opt out of and wouldn’t want to, anyway. It is also a regularly-scheduled global media event. The snowflakes we can’t touch, we can enjoy virtually. It also has a residual religious meaning, whose iconography is far more plausible to Australians than all that secular-pagan snow. After all, at least the nativity story takes place at the edge of a desert. We all know about sheep. We all know what it’s like to be at the farthest corner of an empire. We all know what its like to rely for our blessings on foreign kings. Taken as a symptom, Australia’s attachment to northern symbology betrays a nagging sense that European culture doesn’t really belong in the landscape we find ourselves in. There’s an absurdity in our continuing attempts to import our magic: plants and animals that don’t subsist here, benefactors arriving on sleighs. There’s more in eating roasted meats and hot gravy in pretending that we’re living through the shortest days of the year, not the longest ones. It’s true that sensible adaptations also exist — more appropriate food, more relatable symbols. But few of them make it an any less obvious imposition. The swarm of British celebrity chefs pushing authentic Aussie Christmas fare is just one sign of how brittle our “native” Christmas is. The uneasy truth the fantasy obscures is that there were rich cultures here before us, in whose mythologies the Australian landscape was alive. Then we, the aliens, arrived – with our foreign festival, which will probably never stop being surreal. |