4) Christmas Down Under
Christmas 2002To be able to celebrate Christmas with our family all together again was a wonderful blessing. We woke early and shared the excitement of the girls as they unpacked their stockings and saw what Father Christmas had brought them. I don’t suppose that part of Christmas changes much no matter what part of the world one is in. Later on we went to church with Dominic at the Baptist church in Berowra. The minister there is Bil Ghali and on that morning Bil enacted the story of Christmas from the point of view of the Inn Keeper.
Bil is of Egyptian parentage ( hence his name is Bil and not Bill). With a little extra padding and a false beard he really looked the part. He told us how good he was to the young couple who had come to his inn and had nowhere to stay and how he had ‘out of the goodness of his heart’ given them a place to stay, how he had not charged them as much as he could have for a place in his stable. He told that the baby had been born in the night and how the shepherds had come to visit the little family and how he in his wisdom had realised that there was something very different about this child. If Bil had not been a minister he should have been an actor or scriptwriter but the stage’s loss is surely the church’s gain.
I have lived in the southern hemisphere for many years so am used to having Christmas in the middle of summer. In Africa people had tried to pretend that it was just the same as a northern Christmas and mostly ate a cooked hot meal of turkey, ham steamed puddings and all the trimmings. In Australia they tend to move a little away form the European traditions and much more seafood is served at Christmas. Prawns have become an Australian Christmas tradition and they are sometimes cooked on the barbie (barbeque). A traditional feature of an Australian Christmas eve is the long queue of customers waiting for service at the fish shops and in the fish markets. Quite a lot of people like to have their Christmas barbie on the beach but they are in the minority, most people get together in their homes with their families and enjoy a good meal.
Christmas is a very popular time for people in Australia to take their holidays. The children have a fairly long break and by adding the public holidays to any leave due to them most people can usually increase their holiday by about three or four days. Hotels and caravan parks are heavily booked and there is a great deal of traffic on the roads. Because of this Christmas stretches into mid January and it takes all that time for people to recover from the “Silly season”
Like many other countries, after Christmas the shops have huge sales, where clothes, toys, electrical appliances, furniture and all sorts of consumer goods are reduced to tempt the poor public to part with the few dollars that they have left on their credit cards. Only the other day Jonny commented that each year before Christmas “THEY” say that that this year they are expecting lower than usual Christmas sales but come January it is reported that if fact it was a bumper season and more money was spent than ever before. He has noticed this phenomenon for many years now. Maybe the retail trade thinks that if they tell us how little they are going to make we will all rush out and get ourselves further into debt to make them happy. It seems to be working doesn’t it?
Bil is of Egyptian parentage ( hence his name is Bil and not Bill). With a little extra padding and a false beard he really looked the part. He told us how good he was to the young couple who had come to his inn and had nowhere to stay and how he had ‘out of the goodness of his heart’ given them a place to stay, how he had not charged them as much as he could have for a place in his stable. He told that the baby had been born in the night and how the shepherds had come to visit the little family and how he in his wisdom had realised that there was something very different about this child. If Bil had not been a minister he should have been an actor or scriptwriter but the stage’s loss is surely the church’s gain.
I have lived in the southern hemisphere for many years so am used to having Christmas in the middle of summer. In Africa people had tried to pretend that it was just the same as a northern Christmas and mostly ate a cooked hot meal of turkey, ham steamed puddings and all the trimmings. In Australia they tend to move a little away form the European traditions and much more seafood is served at Christmas. Prawns have become an Australian Christmas tradition and they are sometimes cooked on the barbie (barbeque). A traditional feature of an Australian Christmas eve is the long queue of customers waiting for service at the fish shops and in the fish markets. Quite a lot of people like to have their Christmas barbie on the beach but they are in the minority, most people get together in their homes with their families and enjoy a good meal.
Christmas is a very popular time for people in Australia to take their holidays. The children have a fairly long break and by adding the public holidays to any leave due to them most people can usually increase their holiday by about three or four days. Hotels and caravan parks are heavily booked and there is a great deal of traffic on the roads. Because of this Christmas stretches into mid January and it takes all that time for people to recover from the “Silly season”
Like many other countries, after Christmas the shops have huge sales, where clothes, toys, electrical appliances, furniture and all sorts of consumer goods are reduced to tempt the poor public to part with the few dollars that they have left on their credit cards. Only the other day Jonny commented that each year before Christmas “THEY” say that that this year they are expecting lower than usual Christmas sales but come January it is reported that if fact it was a bumper season and more money was spent than ever before. He has noticed this phenomenon for many years now. Maybe the retail trade thinks that if they tell us how little they are going to make we will all rush out and get ourselves further into debt to make them happy. It seems to be working doesn’t it?
posted by MC @ 2:20 PM
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