Sweet sweat

Over us here
a radiant silver dollar moon
rides on storm-tossed clouds
this Christmas night

hanging below
a dark cobweb string
presents the illusion
of a balloon
that's escaped from earth's grip

She shines equally
on each element
of fractured families
scattered across the globe
like so many pebbles
heedlessly hurled from a giant fist

A recent blog post led one of my family to ask me when I became the grinch that stole Christmas. "You're the one that made me love Christmas,"she moaned. And she's right, I probably did influence her to love Christmas because I used to love Christmas.

I just read Daisy's blog (post -Where are you Christmas?) and she too says how she doesn't look forward to Christmas with the same excitement as she once did, and reading it made me decide to tell you about what Christmas means to me.

When we were kids, Christmas pretty much meant a big bag of goodies left in a pillow case on the end of our beds. My mum didn't do the special Christmas dinner/lunch thing and most years we were either dragged off to visit rellies or taken for a picnic which mum thought was much nicer and more sensible than cooking all that hot food. In fact, before I got married (I was a teenage bride at 16), I can remember looking forward to the presents, but apart from one year when we visited a beloved Aunt who went in for the hot dinner and all the trimmings, I can't remember thinking Christmas was about anything other than the birth of Jesus, the nativity play at school and a sack full of goodies on Christmas morning. At our place, a few strands of tinsel would be strung up around the house and left to become fly-spotted until they gradually fell down sometime around the following July.

That all changed the first Christmas I visited Bob's home. My new mother-in-law was the Queen of Christmas. Every available inch was cluttered with gay decorations and I was to find, each year the colours and the theme would change with new decorations added. One year blue tinsel strung across the ceiling carried a whole band of white reindeer. Real holly and ivy and Christmas bush bloomed from vases in every room. A blow-up Santa sat fatly beneath a real tree strung with glorious glass decorations and coloured lights. Large coloured lights ringed the verandah...well, you get the picture... decorations that are common-place now but then were magical, and for me, the first time I'd ever been involved in a real, full on family Christmas.

This family had a whole string of Christmas parties. The friends party, which our friends became part of, everyone dressed in their best, drinking Pimms and punch and brandy and beer with masses of home-cooked food, Christmas cakes, puddings. The Christmas Eve party for all the children in the family - and it was a large family- where 20 or so kids from 0 to 12 would sit around in front of the tree singing Christmas carols and every one would receive a carefully wrapped package from under the tree and late in the evening, someone would read the poem, "The Night Before Christmas".

Christmas day started with ham and eggs and fresh toast and juice and presents under the lighted tree. Lunch was the highlight of the day, always the full hot deal with oven glazed ham, crisp turkey, pork, roast vegetables, mince pies and the two youngest children always carried in the flaming Christmas pudding doused with brandy. Oh they were great Christmases. That's when I got the spirit of Christmas and that's how I wanted my Christmases to be.

So once I had my first son, we joined in the wonderful family Christmas, but our home was decorated too and we always had a party for friends on Christmas Eve. They were wonderful parties and late in the night when almost everyone had gone home, we'd be up putting the bicycles together and sneaking presents for each other out of their hiding places to join the heaps under the tree.

I got a new husband and two more sons but the Christmas tradition continued and widened. All the family would come on Christmas Eve and stay over for Christmas day. Sometimes we did the hot lunch or dinner, sometimes we had salads and seafood but the ham and the turkey remained constant and so did the delight of the whole family in this celebration. Often someone would invite a 'stray' along. Someone they knew who was away from home or didn't have anwhere else to go for Christmas day. Most Christmases there weren't less than 15 around the Christmas table and often that many staying in the house.

Most years we had a fresh cut pine Christmas tree and the smell of pine needles in the house still means Christmas to me. One year I incurred the undying wrath of my sons when I decided to go 'arty' and spray a dead branch silver and decorate it with coloured bows in place of the traditional tree. I've never been allowed to forget that mistake!

Time moved on, children grew up, I got a new partner and inherited his family too as part of my Christmas. Christmas only got bigger and better every year. We still did the ham and eggs for breakfast, the family still came and stayed on Christmas Eve and we lay around all day playing the new games, telling jokes and reading stories before tucking into a huge lunch.

My sons grown I decided to sell my house and travel for a while... and that was the end of Christmas for me. I no longer have a house I can decorate. I live too far away for family to visit. So now, the wheel has turned and I visit them. We still get together. It's still nice and some of the children who used to come every year to my Christmas have grown up remembering those Christmases and now emulate them for their own children.

That's it in the end. Things change but if you can bring joy into the lives of others, particularly children, then the spirit and the joy lives on in their lives and the traditions they carry on are passed on to their children.

So, I'm not really the grinch that stole Christmas now, just someone whose time at the centre of the Christmas festivities has been passed on to the next generation. I think Pete Seeger summed it up best, so for my Christmas message I'll leave you with his words. May each of you be happy to be in the time and the season that is right for this part of your life and may you all have a joyous Christmas.


There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
Pete SeegerCD: If I Had a Hammer: Songs of Hope & Struggle Words adapted from The Bible, Book of Ecclesiastes
Buy this CD from Amazon.com
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn) There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn) And a time for every purpose, under Heaven
A time to be born, a time to die A time to plant, a time to reap A time to kill, a time to heal A time to laugh, a time to weep
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn) There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn) And a time for every purpose, under Heaven
A time to build up, a time to break down A time to dance, a time to mourn A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn) There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn) And a time for every purpose, under Heaven
A time of love, a time of hate A time of war, a time of peace A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn) There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn) And a time for every purpose, under Heaven
A time to gain, a time to lose A time to rend, a time to sew A time to love, a time to hate
A time for peace, I swear it's not too late.

I'm taking a blogging vacation over the festive season so you probably won't hear from me again until January.

For all you writers and readers out there, I just read a really good book The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper. The hero is an author who writes a story about his small town. He becomes rich and famous but is pretty much universally despised and hated back home because of the way he has characterised them. His father doesn't speak to him and his brother thinks he's a waste of space.

When his father has a stroke, he returns to face his past and his future.

It's snappily written (the blurb recommends it to Nick Hornby fans and I'd concur with that). Here's a quote that appealed to me but there are lots of good lines and interesting thoughts. Maybe you'll put it on your holiday reading list.

"I've never forgiven myself for the head games I played with her during her years in New York, wooing her whenever I felt her slipping away and then pulling back the minute I felt secure again. I allowed her unwavering belief in us to sustain me even at times when I didn't share it, leading her along with promises, both spoken and implied but never fulfilled. By the time I finally began to understand how badly I'd been using her, I had used her up completely."

25 sent - 7 received plus two phone calls in lieu of cards. It's only 10th December, so there's still time. Unfortunately one of those received is from a person I dropped from the list this year - doesn't that always happen!

Best card so far: The home-made one with a tiny little uplifting poem on the front

Most boring: Well none really, these people all made the effort

Most embarrassing: The one sent to me and the former partner from the person I'd dropped from the list - Now the late card and the embarrassing explanation to go with it!

Most interesting: The one from the woman I used to work with in 1983. Haven't seen her for about 15 years but every year we send each other a Christmas card giving a complete update on the year's doings for our families. This has included the whole growing up history of her two boys, one of whom I've never met. I'm sure if we saw each other tomorrow we'd still be as good a friends as we were when we saw each other every day.

Da..dah!!!! ... and my person favourite... this year's most bizarre card came from the 95 year old father and 80 year old stepmother of my former partner with a very nice note from her saying they were very sorry to hear etc... always welcome etc. etc. I would not have thought this woman had an ironic bone in her body but the face of the card showed santa sitting on his sleigh on top of two rockets, with Rudolph about to light a match to the fuse. Rudolph's speech balloon trumpeted "Trust me". It was so appropriate to the situation it completely cracked me up.

So, I've arranged a presentation for work followed by a bus trip to see the sights. There 17 of us on the bus and after a long and very sweaty visit to a mango farm, I, in my thoughtfulness, decide we should stop at a local shop and buy drinks to re-hydrate. I'm paying for the group.

They all run their drinks through the cash register where muggins is waiting, credit card in hand to pay. Duty done, I walk outside to see the bloody bus taking off from the car park without me.

Perhaps they are just moving it out of the way I think. No, not so. As they steam merrily up the hill I run out into the road waving my hands madly and laughing my head off. Faces are peering at me from the back window. They'll turn around soon, I think.

Picture this. The sun is high in the sky. It's about 38 degrees celcius. We are in the middle of nowhere, nothing for miles but the service station where the drinks were bought. I'm dancing in the middle of the road like a demented brolga.

As they disappear over the crest I decide the situation is more desperate than I'd thought and use my mobile to call one of them. My call is answered to gales of laughter - a chorus of 16 voices. "We know, we saw you, we are sending the car back, they should be there soon," she says.

I reckon I need counselling now. I'm paying for their bloody drinks and they totally forget about me and drive off. Just how forgetable is it possible to be!

To add insult to injury, for the remainder of that long afternoon, every time we stopped the bus, 16 concerned faces would stare at me and make pointed remarks to ensure I was on the bus. You would have thought I forgot to get back on; rather than them forgetting to wait for me.

Just us girls! 

Hilarious day filming with Mary G in Litchfield - those guys are so professional and so much fun. 

Adam asked the question, so for him and anyone else who's interested, here's the web address where you can find out about the Australian blogging conference to be held in Melbourne, Australia in February 2005. I know nothing about it except what's on the website which, I was disappointed to find, is difficult enough to read to turn me off bothering - with either the blogsite or the conference. It's laid out newspaper fashion and the font is almost as small and very fine and it's got kind of glarey colours - still, maybe others think it's a style setter - this is just my opinion. Go check it out and see what you think.

The final floral creation - fittingly, a Christmas wreath. Merry Christmas bloggers! 

One of my kind readers suggested that I wasn't blogging because I'd 'got a life'. Another correspondent sent me an article about a meeting of bloggers that's happening soon in Melbourne, that read something along the lines of: all those loners and misfits that usually hide behind their computer terminals are going to show their faces to the world - well the truth is, I haven't got a life (more's the pity), I consider blogging to be a better use of my time than most of my other choices and I haven't been blogging because I'm just used up. Put it down to end of year blues. I'm tired, worn out, fed up and too plain uninspired to bore you with my thoughts.

This week I even had to have a day off work sick. This is the first sick day I've had in 5 years. I'm fortunate that way but hey, it hits hard when you chuck your guts all night, wake up several times with a raging headache and just feel so bloody lethergic that you simply can't be bothered making the effort. That's got to be state of mind. My normal attitude is that I'll be no worse off at work and being there will take my mind off my troubles. Well this time I just thought 'why' and the answer was 'why the hell should I', so I had the day off, slept for half of it, felt marginally better by evening, so forced myself to go to the final night of the flower arranging course.

The final flower picture is posted above. Fortunately or unfortunately last night was also our Christmas party and, having eaten nothing but a couple of dry biscuits all day, I wasn't up to doing justice to the party goodies, the most glorious of which would have had me blanching even on a good day.

Our very large, very happy German teacher proved why she is very large. She brought in some fancy ice cream full of swirls of unimaginable substances. She then topped off the large plates she heaped for everyone with a mountain of cream from one of those spray cans.

My stomach heaved a protest just looking at it. It was the kind of dessert you can imagine only an overweight 10 year old boy sneaking food from the fridge in the middle of the night would go for. I was kind of glad I had an excuse, but 8 other women politely plowed their way through it. I suspect a few even enjoyed it.

Tomorrow I'm working all day - going on a video shoot to Litchfield National Park where I will meet Mary G, the queen of the Kimberley. Mary G is a character invented by a clever Aboriginal man, Mark Bin Baker. She's crude, rude, funny and much beloved by Aboriginal communities across the Top End of Australia (our target market for the video). Should be a fun day and it might drag me out of my lethargy. It will be a long one, first light till last light and it's pretty hot out there just now, so I've catered for the crew and talent with a huge picnic and lots of soft drinks and if it gets too hot, well I'll just throw myself in a waterhole somewhere.

If the crocs and the leeches don't carry me off and I don't fall in love with Mary G and become a groupie, I'll be back to tell you all about it.