Christmas Upside Down

Here it is hot as hot, which is just how a Christmas should be.  Mr Tabubil is is languishing and complains that he can't take the season seriously, but my earliest Christmas memories are of Dad taking my sister and I swimming in a jungle creek while Mum got Christmas dinner sorted without two overexcited children underfoot.  
            And what Christmas dinners!  Christmas was a hot and stodgy English dinner (roast chicken, creamed potatoes, doughy puddings and dense fruit cake) eaten on a hot and sticky verandah, with ceiling fans pushing the heat around and driving rich smells into your face, and afterwards, afternoons spent on the cool grass of the lawn, and children running around with sparklers in the long summer twilight. 
            Over the years we replaced the hot English food with a menu less colonial and more suited to the southern climate, but we embraced all of the other northern Christmas trimmings as a matter of course.  Our Christmas cards showed snowfalls and lantern-light, glittering with sugar frost.  Our dads Ho-Ho-Ho’d in full Santa fig – sweltering under polyester beards and sofa cushion bellies.  Our heads and ears dripped and clinked with tinkling jingle-bells – we, who had never seen a sleigh. We cut Eucalyptus trees and planted them in plastic buckets, raised trees of plastic tinsel, and sniffed the eucalyptus and plastic scents, and satisfied,  called them firs.  When I moved north, a northern Christmas was easy for me. I’d been mentally living one all my life. 
            Mr Tabubil never had the pop-culture guides to tell him what to do with seafood BBQs and carols that, like Australia and Chile, are upside down –
            “The North Wind is tossing the leaves             
            The red dust is over the town            
            The sparrows are under the eaves –“             
            “Red dust?” He shouts. “Red dust?  It’s blizzards! Blizzards and wooly sweaters and ice-skating and hot chocolate and fir-cones and fireplaces-”
            I try for something colder.
            “The tree-ferns in green gullies sway             
            The cool stream flows silently by             
            The joy bells are greeting the day            
             And the chimes are adrift in the sky-”
            Mr Tabubil stamps off into the kitchen to stuff his head into the freezer. And sighs. 
            Merry Christmas, you-all.

Christmas in Santiago

Bah Humbug.

It’s the evening of December the 23rd and right now, at this moment , my holiday spirit is pretty much a solid Bah-Humbug.  I have a new niece (Mr Tabubil’s sister's baby) and she is charming and precocious and clearly miles ahead of every other baby anywhere and I am making her a stuffed elephant for Christmas.  Every time I make a stuffed animal I buy the pattern off of Etsy - Why support some multinational corporation like Butterick or Simplicity when you can support a creative individual?  That's how the thinking goes, anyway - and every single time I do this, after I cut out the pattern pieces and have used up all my fabric, I remember that the reason one supports multinational corporations is because they have a history of actually testing the patterns.  One doesn't have to redesign the whole flaming animal on the fly. The picture on the pattern I picked out was pretty cute, so I gave the elephant a very long name, and even wrote a little story about why elephants have such long names, and how my Valentina Euphrasia Trumpet-toes McGonagall got hers -
            This blamed elephant only has four legs, but as of this evening I've sewn on seven feet and redesigned a trunk and a purple elephant posterior.  Mr Tabubil, my dear husband and helpmeet, thinks the situation’s hysterical.  I’ve no comment.  But my story has a brand new chapter.  It's called "Valentina the Elephant visits the La Brea Tar Pits."  It's very short and extremely educational.