I experienced just that recently on a vacation in Australia over the Thanksgiving (in the USA) holiday. First, Thanksgiving didn’t exist, and even more confusing was the feast of gratitude’s calendrical anchor: was it appropriate to give thanks on the fourth Thursday in November or on the day our families would celebrate in the USA, which was Friday? While there was no Thanksgiving Down Under, the buildup to Christmas was more apparent with this absence from the November calendar. As the late spring heat built in Sydney, Manly, Melbourne, and Ballarat, these cities were setting up their seasonal displays. Melbourne, a city of whimsical public art and architecture, was setting up a Lego Christmas tree in Federation Square and wrapping its river bridges with bows and gigantic mistletoe. At Manly, the public walkway across the spit from the harbor to Manly Beach afforded sensations of warm, moist salt air, surf, and Christmas music.
Amused by what were for us marked contrasts, we asked our Australian friends how they celebrate Christmas. "Prawns on the barbie" was a typical response. It is common to celebrate with barbecued seafood, especially shrimp, accompanied by cold meats and salads. (A great gift, advertised in downtown Ballarat: a deluxe gas barbecue.) It is common to take this feast to the beach. After all, Christmas closely coincides with the longest day of the year, so it's a time to be outside enjoying natural surroundings.
What interests me about Christmas at midsummer is not just these disparities of season but also the way that the European immigrants into Australia adapted to the disparity. Bringing traditions that had developed in association with the shortest days and coldest months, they preserved the idea of a high feast day but adapted the menu. People with whom we spoke noted that they perceive some recent changes in the Christmas Day feast. A previous generation of Anglo-Australians attempted a hot meal with roast beef or ham as the centerpiece and the English hot pudding as a dessert. But younger generations have not wanted to put up with the heat. Barbecuing has become more common, we were told, and an alternative to the hot pudding is a cold pudding made of bread steeped in fresh fruits.
Midsummer in Australia resonates with midwinter in other intriguing ways. Those who want to preserve the heavy traditional meal have relocated it to midwinter. They celebrate “Christmas in July,” which has become a time for family gatherings preserving European midwinter feast traditions. And if one is Swedish-Australian, the correspondence between the two solstice holidays in Swedish tradition becomes even more obvious. Instead of dancing around a Christmas tree set up in the living room, in December one can dance outside, making the “Nu ӓr det jul igen” (Now it is Christmas again) dance look very much like the dance around a midsummer pole that in Sweden is performed on the longest day of the year.
Jennifer Eastman Attebery is professor of English at Idaho State University, where she teaches folklore and also chairs the Department of English and Philosophy. She has twice enjoyed sojourns in Sweden, in 1988 as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at University of Gothenburg and in 2011 as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at Uppsala University. Attebery is the author of Up in the Rocky Mountains: Writing the Swedish Immigrant Experience and Pole Raising and Speech Making: Modalities of Swedish American Summer Celebration. Her studies of Swedish culture in the Rocky Mountain West have also been published in Scandinavian Studies and Swedish-American Historical Quarterly.
