Dispense with that ‘portable nightmare’, the Christmas Pudding! So we are advised by a nineteenth century correspondent to the Goulburn Herald.
If Sir has ever entertained private misgivings about relations who sent him stationery featuring snowscenes, Northern Hemisphere fauna, and doubtfully attired old codgers - take heart from the following excerpt.
If Madam has maintained a sustained and well-authenticated whine about the fearful cost of feeding the horde this Christmas, abandon the pud, the goose, the turkey - and burn those old recipes.
It’s now okay to not feel guilty about saying “Oh no not Christmas again already!” It would appear that as soon as the thinking colonial of the last century perceived the realities of December Down Under, he concluded that imported cultural practices did not coincide with Australian realities, - and he didn’t even have a
bankcard to worry about!
“A merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Not that I mean it; for in point of fact, dear friends, I do not care two straws whether you spend a merry Christmas or not. Only, as a wish is presumed to be the correct thing on this festive occasion, I must perforce follow the fashion and pretend to be amiable.
Merry Christmas! Very merry - with the bailiffs drinking beer in the kitchen. A merry Christmas with the roast beef in a violent perspiration and the thermometer at 110 degrees in the shade. A remarkably merry Christmas, with the hot wind raging, and one’s plate of Christmas cheer two fork handles deep in gravel.
An excessively merry Christmas for John Shepherd, as he sits in the shade of his cabbage-tree hat on the burnt out grass of the Tartarus Plains, munching his bread and mutton wearily, while the sheep lie in panting groups, strung out under the haze away down to the box tree that stands where a dusty fissure shows where the creek ought to he. The merriest of merry Christmases to young Cuttemoute, travelling on the roads with store cattle and unable to make the public-house and smithy which constitute the township until the week after New Year’s Day.
It may be rank heresy, but I deliberately, affirm that Christmas in Australia is a gigantic mistake.
The keeping of Christmas is a simple waste of time and money. ‘Will the coming man drink wine? “ asks a writer in the Atlantic Monthly recently. I may also ask, “Will the coming man keep Christmas? “ and answer in the negative.
I myself take no interest in the coming man having “come “ for my own part, as far as I can - but if the gentleman in question is sensible and possesses digestive organs, it is quite possible that he will refuse to load his stomach with that portable nightmare popularly known as plum pudding, and that he will decline to consider the eating of hot roast beef until his eyelids will no longer wag as a pleasant and Christian duty.
Custom at present binds its iron chain around all who are not, like myself, philosophical.
“The world’s dread laugh,
Which scarce the stern philosopher can brave,”
Compels us to masticate unwholesomeness in honour of Christmas Day. We fondly think of the “Old Country “, of the village church, the snow, and the blind-man’s buff.
We think of an English Christmas Day,
“When all around the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow
And Marian’s nose is red and raw,
and cheat ourselves into the belief that we are fondly commemorating the happy days of childhood; that the uneasy feelings under out waistcoats are due to suppressed emotion, not undigested food; and that it is love, not whiskey, that has got into our heads”. The Goulburn Herald and Chronicle, January 2. 1869
Mary Anne Bunn
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