White Wine in the Sun

There is so much more I want to say about this song, but it's 6pm on Christmas Eve, and I've only just had breakfast.

There's a reason for my cereal tardiness - I'm doing some overnight shifts for Crisis Christmas again this year, so currently live like a vampire. In a coming out at night and sleeping during the day kind of way, obviously, not a drinking other people's blood kind of way. When it comes to vampire analogies, boundaries can be important.

If I'd had more time and more sleep I'd attempt to explain the strange cognitive dissonance which happens whenever I start thinking about Christmas; something, funnily enough, I'm prone to do at this time of year. Although I don't think cognitive dissonance is quite the term I'm looking for; that would imply that I'm uncomfortable, to some degree, with having two wildly different and completely conflicting versions of the concept  of "Christmas" floating around in my head. But I'm not. Instead of fighting it out with each other, "This Christmas" and "That Christmas" live side by side in perfect harmony.

"This Christmas" is cold and snow (well, icy sludge now) and turkey with all the trimmings, and tinsel and shiny lights and dark evenings and watching telly. It makes perfect sense. "That Christmas" is sitting on my parents' veranda in thirty-something degree heat, going to the beach, air-conditioning, flies, platters of cold seafood.  It makes perfect sense too.

People - by which  I mean people who aren't me - tend to have very fixed ideas about what a "proper" Christmas is; how it smells, how it looks, what it feels like. I have two versions and they both feel utterly right.  It's weird. And it's just a symptom, I think, of a bigger mental battle which is to do with national identity.  The question of whether I'm an Australian who lives in London or a Brit who just happens to have been born and raised in Australia is one which quietly bubbles away in the back of my mind most of the time, and something I've been meaning to blog about for a while.  I still want to, but there is probably a better time to do it  than half way through the Ashes series.

For now, what I'll say about Tim Minchin's alternative Christmas carol is this: It's a beautiful song.  And regardless of whether or not you agree with its take on religion, it's something else which makes complete and utter sense.



I'll be back in a week or so, I expect.  In the meantime have a very Merry Christmas, whatever yours might looks like.