One of the badges on our blog is for the etsy bloggers team. I’m just a new member and I’ve found that one of the things we do is a blog carnival where we blog about a certain topic. One of the themes at the moment is “The month of December is filled with many traditions from around the world. Share one with us.” So I thought I’d share some stuff that happens for our Kiwi Christmas
Moving to the summer Christmas of New Zealand from the freezing winter Christmas of north of England 25 years ago was quite a culture shock!
For the first couple of years my mam and dad tried to keep up with the English Christmas day tradition of a big roast turkey lunch with all of the trimmings. After finding that sweating through our lunches in the humidity and mid day heat wasn’t the nicest way to spend the day we started to do what most people do. Barbecue. So now we have pancakes, strawberries and bucks fizz for breakfast, and a late lunch sat outside in the shade eating salads, ham steaks and prawns from the bbq .
Also New Zealand tends to close shop, from December 24th to about January 11th a lot of businesses close and heaps of people take their summer holidays, the cities are quiet and the beach towns swell to 3x their usual size. We also have 2 public holidays for Christmas (the 25th and 26th December. The 26th is Boxing Day, which is an English tradition) and 2 for New Year (the 1st and the 2nd January)
So that’s a bit about our Kiwi Christmas. And talking of bbq’s ours is broken beyond repair and after a very successful couple of hours on our stall at my work we now have enough to go and buy a new one this weekend in preparation for the summer ahead - hurray!
"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all" Douglas Adams
Enjoy your new BBQ - I could live with that, except maybe the humidity - I've got plenty of it here and want to get away from it.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your sharing. I found this information very interesting. I knew that in Australia Christmas time is their hottest time of the year from a friend whose son and family live there... have always been curious about New Zealand...wonder if it's too late for an old lady to move that far?
it's real interesting to learn about the holidays ALL over the world! Thanks for sharing - welcome to the etsybloggers! {:-Deb
ReplyDeleteDoris - it's never too late for anyone to do anything :-) The South Island has more dry summers and less humidity, and by the beach it's not so bad.
ReplyDeleteDeb, thanks for the welcome! I've enjoyed reading about all sorts of holidays too, what a great way to learn more about the people we share the earth with :-)
We still manage to do the Turkey. :)
ReplyDelete... but it's barbequed.