Christmas Archives - thegoodwills.com

A Festive Feast of Christmas Movies

Has it ever occurred to you how few Australian Christmas movies there are and why our lives are so permeated by American culture (such as it is)? This week’s theme came to mind whilst seated in a front row pew at St Mark’s Anglican church in Warwick. We were participating in a Christmas service with our new choir, the East Street Singers.

It’s a magnificent 151-year-old sandstone kirk with a landmark tower, stained glass windows and distinctive bells which ring out over the town. The church has been much renovated and added to over the years and now is raising funds for sandstone restoration work costing $1 million. (see photo below)

The choir performed at various points during the evening church service, so there was time to sit and reflect. In my case, this amounted to thinking back many years to my childhood, raised in the Methodist faith by devout parents. Should I say this was my first time in a church since a funeral several years ago? I listened quite avidly to the ‘message’ by St Mark’s new Rector, the Rev Lizzie Gaitskell. I told her afterwards that her message was far removed from the fire and brimstone sermons of my childhood.

Her self-penned message compared the humble origins of the Christmas story with the commercial, chocolate-box version of the festive season. In saying so she confessed that she and her children has been indulging in a slightly saccharine diet of Christmas movies, courtesy of Netflix. The formulaic movies feature “picture-perfect, drought-free, carefree towns and villages in a festively snow-clad America, or a delightfully chocolate-box looking kingdom in Europe.”

“Is Christmas really to be found in this chocolate box escape hatch of our own contriving?” she asked.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the first Christmas, she added – was there even a donkey and a stable as such? Rev Gaitskill names Mary’s husband, Joseph, as the under-rated character in the Christmas story.

“In all likelihood Mary was little more than a teenager; carrying a child that was not her husband Joseph’s – though his readiness to marry her, guaranteed both hers and the baby’s safety.

“A young, first time Mother, giving birth outside her home town after a long journey. It’s as far from chocolate box as you can get.”

I ought not to confess to a wandering mind while listening to Lizzie deliver a message she had clearly put much time and thought into. But I was latching on the kernel of an idea for today’s FOMM, which I realised at that moment would be my 2019 Christmas message.

So the topic this week is Christmas movies, of which there are so many that websites dedicated to cinema can easily rattle off a ‘top 50’ or ‘top 100’ movies.

Two observations to be made here: the majority of movies have been generated by Hollywood, typically covering all of the traditional bases − Santa, snow, snowmen, reindeer, sleighs, plum pudding, Christmas bells, mistletoe, carols, Christmas trees and gift-giving.

The second point is that so few Christmas movies can stand repeated viewings, and even then, only once a year.

First of all there are feel-good movies which have no real bearing on Christmas other than that they are set at that time of year (Home Alone*, Love Actually*) or Christmas-setting action dramas (Diehard, Beverly Hills Cop*).

Some are (depending on your sense of humour and ideas about taste and relevance), quite appalling. I cite Bad Santa I and II, Gremlins and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation *. This third movie in a series about the hapless Griswold family is as tacky as the other two, raising the point made by a critic “One of the wonder s of Hollywood is how Chevy Chase still manages to get work.”

How crass is crass? Try this dialogue (from the 55 top Christmas movies review by Rotten Tomatoes).

Todd Chester: Hey Griswold! Where do you think you’re gonna put a tree that big?

Clark W. Griswold Jr. Bend over and I’ll show you!

Some of the movies mentioned can be seen on free-to-air TV in the coming week (those with an asterisk and also, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Fred Klaus, Christmas with the Kranks and the (execrable) Office Christmas Party.

So what rings my Christmas bell, you may ask?

As you may know from my song ‘Burning Father’s Letters’, I am something of a Dickens fan. So most of the 30+ versions of A Christmas Carol sum up the Christmas message for me.

The classic story of Scrooge, a bitter miser who is beset by ghosts of Christmas past and persuaded to mend his ways, has been re-told dozens of times in wildly different ways.

I have seen maybe 6 versions, but movie websites rottentomatoes.com and cinemablend.com will tell you more than you ever needed to know about the others.

Starting with the silent version in 1901, A Christmas Carol keeps getting retold because it is a classic case of humanity prevailing over capitalism.

As it happens, the FX made-for-TV mini-series, starring Australia’s Guy Pierce as Ebenezer Scrooge, was released just yesterday.

It has already gleaned some scathing reviews, primarily for turning Scrooge into a scheming psychopath rather than a habitual curmudgeon. I will probably watch it anyway, as it is directed by Peaky Blinders director Steve Knight (who has a reputation for gothic ultra-violence).

The critics unanimously picked the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol starring Alistair Sim as a stand-out. I did like the 2009 CGI-laden version starring Jim Carrey. While it did stray from the Dickens story, I liked Bill Murray’s Scrooged. Some years back I recall seeing George C Scott and Edward Woodward in a British version which stuck authentically to the Dickens story.

Meanwhile in Australia, with our upside down version of Christmas, there have been only a half-dozen Christmas films worth mention.

They include the 1947 Chips Rafferty classic, Bush Christmas, remade in 1983 with Nicole Kidman, making her screen debut at 16. Now that we have a smart TV with access to a vast database of movies, I might track down this Jane Campion-directed movie (Ed: he always had a thing about Nicole, who I call ‘the stick insect’).

The Guardian’s Travis Johnston had a stab at making sense of Australia’s unwillingness to come to the Christmas movie party. He put it down to ‘simple visual iconography’.

“We celebrate Christmas in Australia, for sure, but we’re a desert island that experiences a seemingly endless summer, and the traditional trappings of the northern hemisphere holiday look a bit ludicrous against the bright, cloudless skies and blistering heat of an Australian December.”

I shall round out this FOMM with a few links to my Christmases-past. Thank you for supporting this weekly essay, now in its sixth year. I wrote this one on a fast-dying Toshiba laptop on a keyboard with two missing keys and the letters worn off five or six of the characters through relentless typing.

As my French travelling companion Marcel said in his tiny Paris apartment, circa 1978: “Merde – you write like a machine!”

Merry Christmas. Take care out there.

2018 https://bobwords.com.au/friday-on-my-mind-ring-christmas-bells-and-other-carols/

2017 https://bobwords.com.au/fomm-alt-christmas-playlist/

2016 https://bobwords.com.au/obamas-last-christmas-card/

Black Friday and a spot of retail therapy

Black-Friday-retail — “Get in there, damn it’ – Image by Sean Leahy

We who have always associated ‘Black Friday’ with Friday the 13^th (unlucky for some), were no doubt confused by the retail rallying call of the past week.

According to McCrindle Research, the US concept of Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), is gaining traction in Australia. Back in 2017, a McCrindle survey showed that 1 in 4 (24%) of Australians had never heard of Black Friday. Two years on, only 6% of Australians have never heard of Black Friday. This year’s research showed that almost 45% of respondents were going to take advantage of sales and discounts.

In the US, Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), is a signal for 100 million Americans to walk off their turkey dinners and go shopping. Americans typically spend more than US$50 billion on this one day.

She Who Researches Before Buying was following me around one of Brisbane’s biggest retail barns on Sunday. The shopping list was (1) a smart TV (2) a portable air conditioner (3) a microwave (4) a vacuum cleaner and (5) an entertainment unit. SWRBB had decided that only item 2 was needed immediately. Things changed once we entered the blissfully chilled domain of a category killer retailer (when I say chilled I refer to the room temperature, not the ambient noise level).

We’d done a bit of research into items 1 and 2, so were quickly persuaded by the price of the short-listed TVs (both $250 below the RRP). Those of you who shop early and often will know that RRP stands for recommended retail price. Since the majority of such items began to emerge from factories in China, very few retailers insist upon RRP. I’m not privy to the wholesale figures, but it’s a fair bet that 30% off something made in China still allows the retailer to make a profit.

This might be a good time to confess that my One And Only (O&O) and I, to borrow a term of endearment from blogger Kathryn Johnston, are the most sales-resistant people outside of hard-core hippies and those with no cash or credit. When we buy big-ticket retail items, the drill is that I produce my credit card and between us we pay the balance off at the end of the month. Did I mention we had earlier bought two ceiling fans from a lighting sales room which cried out ‘while you are here’ ?

Back at the big barn front counter, after resisting attempts to have us upgrade to a five-year warranty, I noticed a sign warning buyers that TVs 55 inches or bigger may not fit into a normal vehicle. Time to tell us now.

After heading to despatch behind the enormous tilt-slab warehouse, we encountered a fit-looking guy who checked out the vehicle. He suggested we move this here and that there and let the back seats down. Between us we got the 55 inch TV into the vehicle, leaning it on the portable air conditioner (itself a substantial package) the two fans, an esky, two folding chairs, a bag of dog crunchies and a yoga mat. Wisely, we left the microwave, entertainment unit and vacuum cleaner for another day, vowing to shop locally.

In relating this rare venture into retail sales, I am more aware than ever that while the car park was full and people were milling about purposefully, the latest studies on consumer confidence suggest the retail sector is in recession. Even the most bullish retailers concede they are unlikely to set new spending records this month. I genuinely wish it were different, as a few people I know work in retail (and a few more that work part-time).

The Westpac-Melbourne Institute Consumer Sentiment Index fell by more than 5% in October to 92.8 points, the lowest reading since July 2015. A reading of 100 sits on the barbed wire fence between optimism and pessimism. Even though the index bounced back (up 45% in November to 97.0), the survey authors say the mood is still downbeat as we enter the Christmas shopping month. Another long-running survey, the ANZ-Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence index, is at a four-year low of 106.8. The index averaged 114.4 this year, down 3.5% from 118.5 in 2018.

The weekly survey also showed a 1.5% drop in the numbers of respondents who thought they were better off at the same time last year.

Australia has its own economic quirks, but it is interesting to note that similar surveys in the US have been on the slide since August.

As the Australian Financial Review’s Sue Mitchell reminded us, Harvey Norman chief executive Katie Paige warned back in August that the government’s tax cuts were unlikely to stimulate retail spending. A concurrent ATO crackdown on individual and business taxpayers prompted small businesses and consumers to keep their heads down (meaning to avoid being involved in something/anything).

Retail sales have been in a trough all year, despite the Reserve Bank’s optimistic forecast of a “gentle turning point” for the economy.

When working as a business writer in the late 1980s and 1990s, I researched retail sales trends, because they often foreshadowed upturns (or downturns) in the economy. The AFR’s Sue Mitchell was specialising in this sector in that era and she’s still there!

So when she tells you retail sales figures have recorded the biggest fall since the 1990-91 recession, you might want to pay attention. Year on year sales growth has slowed from 3.7% in September 2018 to 2.5% in September this year, Mitchell reported. Sales volumes fell 0.1% in the quarter and by 0.2% over the past 12 months.

Super Retail Group chief executive Anthony Heraghty told the AFR the sector was volatile.

“Customers are up and down and you’ll see a couple of good weeks and then a week that’s not so impressive,” Heraghty said. (This might be the right place to disclose that the Cheeseparer Superannuation Fund recently bought shares in Super Retail Group, which owns Rebel, Supercheap Auto, BCF and Macpac.)

The irony for Australian retailers is that the seemingly endless cycle of discount days has created an expectation that the RRP is permanently up for negotiation.

Conservative people who rarely lash out on ‘stuff’ will put their must-buy list aside and wait for the Boxing Day sales. Or the Back to School, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, End of Financial Year, Father’s Day, Singles Day, Click Frenzy, Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday or pre-Christmas sales. Hurry, hurry, all stock must go.

I’ll leave the last word to The Chaser’s 2007 spoof,’ ‘Killer Persian Rug Sale’. This 45-second mock ad was one of many such over the top send-ups of Australia’s fast-talking television retail sales arena.

“Must sell by midnight or die”.

Today’s illustration is by cartoonist Sean Leahy, one of Queensland’s best-known artists.

https://www.facebook.com/leahycartoons/

Friday on My Mind –Ring Christmas Bells And Other Carols

Tapestry choir leader Kim Kirkman usually introduces our version of Carol of the Bells by mentioning that it featured in the soundtrack of the 1990 movie, Home Alone. This brought back memories of the parlous times in 1990 when media baron Rupert Murdoch nearly went broke. Yes, he nearly did, back when News Ltd’s total debt was a scary $7.9 billion (this was 1990, remember). What saved Murdoch was an agreement between 146 banks that refinancing was a better solution than the collateral damage from a collapsing global media empire.

The other thing that saved Murdoch was the box office success of the Christmas movie, Home Alone, starring Macaulay Culkin. Home Alone became the highest grossing Christmas movie of all time (adjusted for inflation) taking $US477 million in box office sales world-wide, against a film budget of $18 million. Murdoch’s Twentieth Century Fox was the beneficiary of the film’s success. As a recently-employed journalist, I wrote a piece stating just that (News Ltd saved by Home Alone).

The movie spawned four sequels, none of which achieved the heights of the original.

As we all now know, Rupert Murdoch’s foray into film, television and satellite TV paid off. The timely acquisition of 20^th Century Fox in 1986 helped Murdoch achieve more fame and fortune via a then unknown animated show, The Simpsons. Launched modestly in December 1989, The Simpsons is still going strong, 649+ episodes later.

As one of the most popular TV shows on Fox Broadcasting, the creators of The Simpsons repeatedly got away with satirising the Fox Network. Animator David Silverman is said to have based the appearance of Homer’s boss Montgomery Burns on Fox chief Barry Dillon, using the body of a praying mantis as a model. Monty Burns is the fictional owner of Springfield’s nuclear power plant, a greedy tycoon who exploits his workers and can rarely remember their names. Hmmm, as Marge Simpson would say.

The crew of Sunshine Coast radio station Hot91 were asked to rate favourite Christmas movies for a feature in the Sunshine Coast Daily’s Weekend Magazine (also owned by Rupert Murdoch). All three DJs rated Home Alone, along with other candidates including The Grinch, Bad Santa (execrable-Ed.), National Lampoon’s Xmas Vacation, Elf, Santa Clause and Love Actually. The latter is cerebral and worth watching but I remember Home Alone as being deeply silly with some dangerous-looking stunts.

Christmas songs often get written about at this time of year, which is hardly surprising as you rarely hear them between January and November. Last year I ranked my top 12 Christmas songs (only three of which are carols).

The FOMM alt-Christmas playlist

As a member of a choir, you are expected to sing Christmas carols, which almost always lend themselves to harmonies. Our choir Tapestry racked up five performances this month, which is some kind of a record. As a serious chamber choir, we mixed it up a bit, from the ancient (Veni Veni, a Gregorian chant in Latin) to an irreverent piece about Christmas excess (The Banquet Fugue), and a short protest song (‘The Wrong Present’ aka ‘Don’t sing me Christmas Carols anymore’). We did a good job of the Little Drummer Boy and worked an uplifting key change into the last verse of Handel’s Joy to the World.

Thankfully, Kim elected to stay away from the tedious (12 Days of Christmas) and the seasonally irrelevant (White Christmas and Frosty the Snowman), although we did perform Rudolph and We Wish You a Merry Christmas for those who might have been thinking we were being a bit too precious.

This month She Who Sings O Holy Night (that was in Home Alone too), with me in tow attended quite a few Christmas parties where carol books were handed out. I got chatting to a chap who was hovering out in the kitchen (my usual retreat at parties). We discussed why people are so attached to these songs, so many of which are deeply pious, with their references to the Virgin birth, three wise men, the holy infant and home birthing in a stable.

Statistics on religiosity are unreliable; even though the 2016 Census tells us that only 52.1% of Australians identify as Christian, it is an optional question, which 9.1% chose not to answer. Otherwise, 30.1% answered ‘no religion’ and 8.2% nominated a faith other than Christian (including 2.6% or about 630,000 people, who follow Islam).

You will find other surveys which suggest that Christianity is in decline and that Australia is becoming more secular. Which begs the question why people who probably last entered a church for a wedding or funeral will happily sing along with Good King Wenceslas and Oh Come all Ye Faithful. Ah well, it is all about peace, love and goodwill so what’s not to like.

As you might suspect, however, I prefer Christmas songs that take the piss. This year’s award goes to Keir Nuttall’s classic Christmas Landfill, performed here by Keir and his partner Kate Miller-Heidke. The combination of a sweet Christmas melody and Keir’s satirical lyrics (‘fleeting joy will never decompose’) is just perfect, moreso with the help of superimposed lyrics. This video also includes KMH’s cover of Tim Minchin’s White Wine in the Sun.

I should follow this with a reassurance that I’m not dissing Christmas or the joy it clearly brings so many people. You can tell how serious I am by the inclusion of this video of Tapestry performing The Little Drummer Boy, The women had the melody, so the job for the basses and tenors was to imitate drums (hence heads buried in scores).

I should also clarify my remarks about Christmas carols and religious music in general by observing that the charismatic church Hillsong has produced Australia’s best-selling CD on a fairly regular basis. Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Bernard Zuel harshly but probably accurately described Hillsong’s 2015 Aria winning album Empires as a ‘churchy songbook sung by mostly anonymous faces scrubbed clean of any travails’. Nonetheless, the album sold 7,000 copies in its first week of release, 2,000 more than the debut solo album of former Silverchair songwriter Daniel Johns. Go figure.

Since we exposed you to Tapestry’s version of the Little Drummer Boy, let me leave you with this version by Johnny Cash and Neil Young.)

Merry Christmas from FOMM. Take care on the roads (said he who got a ticket in the mail from NZ).

Re changes at FOMM: Next Friday you will all receive a link to a New Year blog. Thereafter, the weekly email will direct you to the website www.bobwords.com.au. Anyone can subscribe (email link at the top of the page) and of course unsubscribe at any time.

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The FOMM alt-Christmas playlist

The first thing you’ll notice about my carefully curated alt-Christmas playlist is the absence of Six White Boomers and The 12 Days of Christmas. I’ll walk out of the room if someone starts on that tedious epic. I was intending to write a Grinch-like piece this week, but instead decided to share my eclectic view of the world through an alt-Christmas playlist.

What set me off on this tangent, dear reader, was making visits to three different shopping centres in the past three weeks. It wasn’t so much the crowds, the noise, the proliferation of tattoos or the inappropriate wardrobe choices that got me down. It was being assailed, or should that be wassailed on all sides by different streams of Christmas music. It ranged from Bing and that tired old northern hemisphere trope to Jose Feliciano wishing us a merry one from the heart of his bottom.

For someone whose preferred background music is Bach or Riley Lee playing the shakuhachi, it is an assault on the senses. It seemed to me, though, that most people were oblivious to Rudolph and Frosty the Snowman, as they trudged around shopping centres at Carindale, North Lakes and Morayfield. In fact, as their laden trolleys would indicate, they seemed intent upon spending.

A survey this week by finder.com.au reckons Australian shoppers will spend $492 (each) on Christmas gifts alone. Women will apparently spend $58 more than men. Finder’s Bessie Hassan said the 2017 spending estimate was slightly lower than 2016, when Australians spent on average $539 on Christmas presents.

The shopping swarms were probably to be expected, given the 3.6% rise in the consumer confidence index between November and December. The Westpac Melbourne Institute’s Index is 5% above the average for the September quarter, which saw a ‘disturbing’ slump in consumer spending.

While consumer confidence may have bounced back at a critical time for retailers and their landlords, the keepers of the index are circumspect.

“…with ongoing weak income growth, a low savings rate and high debt levels, we cannot be confident that consumers have the capacity to sharply lift spending, despite higher confidence.”

The irony of my three visits to large shopping centres is, had I planned ahead to buy the small but well-chosen gifts, I could have done it online and saved myself the grief.

So to the FOMM alt-Christmas playlist; they’re not all leftie, anti-Christmas rants and there’s a thread of peace and love running through all of them.

There are a couple of genuine carols, a peace anthem or two, some Australian content and more.

My music correspondent Franky’s Dad offered to create a Spotify alt-Christmas play list for me. Until he did that, I had not subscribed to Spotify. (Hands up who else has no idea what ‘Spotify’ is. Ed.) Unlike many list stories you will find on the Internet, these songs are not in order of preference. I happen to like all of them, but feel free to disagree or tell me which alt-Christmas song I should have included instead.

All of the links here are to YouTube videos. Just dip into them as the spirit moves you. For those who have Spotify, here’s the link:

1/ The Little Drummer Boy, interpreted here by my favourite acapella group, Pentatonix. If you like the group and this genre of music, they do a splendid version of Jolene with songwriter Dolly Parton.

2/ River, by Joni Mitchell. Ah, what a wistful, sad song. They’re cutting down trees and putting up reindeer, singing songs of joy and peace. But Joni just wants a river to skate away on (as you do if you live in Canada).

3/ Fairytale of New York, The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, a bawdy anti-Christmas ballad of drunkenness and fractious relationships. I like the bit where the boys from the NYPD sing Galway Bay. A classic.

4/ I’m growing a beard downstairs for Christmas, Kate Miller-Heidke and The Beards. This quirky, M-rated Christmas satire won the best Comedy/Novelty song category in the 2015 International Songwriting Competition.

5/ 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night, Simon & Garfunkel, 1966. Half a century later, this timeless carol’s theme of peace and goodwill is still being drowned out by the negativity of global news.

6/ Suddenly it’s Christmas – Loudon Wainwright III. Yep, it starts with Halloween (forget about Thanksgiving, that’s just a buffet in between). As Loudo sings – it’s not over till it’s over and they throw away the tree.” The Spotify version is a remix, but the impudent tone is still there.

7/ Happy Xmas (War is Over). One of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s many pleas for world peace.

8/ Getting Ready for Christmas Day, Paul Simon. From early in November to the last day of December, he’s got money matter weighing him down. Simon cleverly intersperses the lyric with a 1941 sermon, voiced by black American preacher, Rev J.M Gates.

9/ The Silver Stars, Brisbane Birralee Voices. This is an Australian carol by William James which has also been sung by our Maleny chamber choir, Tapestry.

10/ Little Saint Nick, the Beach Boys. I’ve got Macca from Australia all Over to thank for this as he played this merry tune to close out his show last week. It sounds a bit like a rebadged Little Deuce Coupe, but who’s complaining.

11/ How to Make Gravy, Paul Kelly. Where would we be in Australia without the letter to Dan from Joe, who’ll be spending Christmas in jail? Kiss my kids on Christmas Eve and make sure you add a dollop of tomato sauce to the gravy.

The Christians and the Pagans, Dar Williams. The definitive song about disaffected families and how they come together at Christmas and try to find common ground.

(Our friend Rebecca Wright does a cracker version of this one).

Meanwhile, people, there are only 2+ days more shopping days to spend your quota. The Australian Securities and Investment Commission’s Money Smart tells us that the average credit card debt after the holiday season is $1,666. While 82% of Australians will pay this off in up to 6 months, 11% will take six to 24 months; 4% will take two years or more and 3% believe they will never pay it off.

If you are worried about waking up with a debt hangover, go here, where you’ll find helpful tips, It’s probably too late for this year, but as Loudon Wainwright observes, of all such holidays, ‘it’s not over till it’s over’.

Season’s Greetings and take care on the roads – Bob and Laurel.

Flashback to Christmas 2015

Catch a (brush) turkey for Christmas

turkey-christmas — Brush turkey for Christmas dinner? – image by She Who Takes Bird Photos, aka Laurel Wilson

The only thing more difficult than taking a photo of a brush turkey is selling the notion of preparing one for a (budget) Christmas lunch. Those of you quick on the uptake will have already registered that Mr FOMM is being ironic. Brush turkeys as you may know are a protected and even endangered species. Besides, they have a “stuff you’ attitude which is refreshing (bok!) And the chicks are cute.

As it happens, turkey is the least popular meat for people laying in provisions for Christmas. The ubiquitous Christmas ham leads the pack by a good margin, along with chicken, then turkey.

Northern hemisphere folk might find this hard to fathom, but rich hot food is not a priority for the Australian Christmas lunch. No, we prefer ham, chicken, prawns, a variety of cold salads and condiments, followed up with fruit salads, ice-cream, custard and yoghurt, all of it more befitting our typical 30+ degree Christmas Day. The diehards do Christmas pudding, but as we all know, it takes a long afternoon nap to sleep it off.

Retailers work hard at this time of year to sell us on the idea of (a) over-eating (b) over-spending and (c) eating food we rarely eat. The latter includes turkey, which has its biggest sales between December 20 and 24. I’m aware turkey is very big in the US and Canada on November 23 (Thanksgiving). According to the University of Illinois, 88% of Americans surveyed by the National Turkey Federation eat turkey on Thanksgiving; 46 million turkeys are eaten each Thanksgiving, 22 million at Christmas and 19 million at Easter

Compare that with Australia, where 3 to 5 million turkeys are killed and sold for meat every year. On average, Australians eat approximately 1kg of turkey per person per year, most of which is consumed during one week at Christmas.

You’ll pay about $110 for an organic turkey, or about $22 a kilo.

You can find loads of information on the Internet about meat consumption, much of it available on animal welfare websites, which point out the factory-like habitat of animals being fattened for consumption. I have a few things to say about that and one is that after being sent on an assignment to one of Queensland’s largest (cattle) feedlots, I went vegetarian for two or three months.

As you may not know, there are 2.1 million Australians (11.2%) who say they are vegetarians (Roy Morgan Research, 2016). Vegans are lumped in with vegetarians, though it’s not the same thing.

If you were curious about what vegos eat at Christmas, musician Emma Nixon says she makes a roast vegie, quinoa and lentil salad.

“It’s good hot or cold. I take the leftovers to Woodford ”

Another muso, Karen Law, says her family eats fish but is otherwise fully vegan. This year they might throw some salmon on the bbq, plus a lot of salad, bbq sweet potato and kipfler potatoes.

Folk dancers Peter and Linda Scharf favour tofu kebabs, with satay sauce, falafels, bean patties, salads with extra trimmings and dressings. Not to mention plum pudding (no suet) and a couple of glasses of ‘fermented grape juice’.

To spew or not to spew

Meanwhile, non-vegan Aussies are very big on eating prawns at Christmas – 50,000 tonnes were consumed last year at this time. Just so you know, 80% of prawns sold in Australia are imported and it costs about $50 a kilo to buy locally-caught prawns.

As I am one of an indeterminate number of people for whom prawns induce violent chundering*, I cannot explain the appeal. I watch people spending inordinate amounts of time shelling prawns (is that the right term) and it always seems to me there is more to throw out than what makes it into the ice bucket.

One Christmas past we returned from a holiday at the beach to be greeted with an awful smell, which was quickly traced to a full, broken, leaking and putrid wheelie bin on the street outside our house. Someone had waited until our (clean) bin was collected and replaced it with their munted* bin full of prawn waste. Eeuuw, people!

Full credit to Brisbane City Council waste management who (a) picked up the offending bin within 24 hours and (b) replaced it with a brand-new bin.

But I digress (yet again)

We are a wealthy country with relatively high disposable income, low-ish unemployment and a reputation for spending more than we earn.

Australian Retailer Association executive director Russell Zimmerman told SBS News last year that food and drink accounts for 40% per cent of the total Christmas spend.

The Pork Producers of Australia said that in the four weeks leading up to Christmas, 8.4 million kilos of ham was sold in 2015 and about the same in 2016. In terms of traditional bone-in hams, it was about 4.3 million kilograms in 2015 and 4.6 million kilograms in 2016 – an increase of 7.6%.

Our local research found that the price of Christmas hams can range from as little as $7 a kilo in discount supermarkets to $18 a kilo for organic and/or free range ham bought from a butcher. A premium boneless leg of ham could cost you upwards of $30 a kilo.

That seems cheap when you read about Spain’s jamon imberico, the truffle of the pork world. A 7.5 kg leg can cost between $A180 and $A720. Iberian ham comes from blackfoot pigs, raised on pasture planted with oak trees. According to my favourite source (The Guardian Weekly), the demand for Iberian ham in China is such that the escalating price is denying humble Spaniards their once-a-year treat.

Just so you know what you’re eating, all fresh pork sold in Australia is 100% Australian grown. However, approximately two thirds of processed pork (ham, bacon and smallgoods products) is made from frozen boneless pork imported from places like Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada and the United States.

According to an international study by Caterwings, Australians chew their way through 111.5 kilograms of meat per year, per person. (Someone’s eating our share). This data probably does not take into account the 11.2% of Australians who are vegetarians and vegans, the 604,000 Muslims as well as those of the Jewish faith who do not eat pork; or the unknown number of people who have developed a mammalian meat allergy by exposure to ticks (more on that topic next week).

If you can’t afford $90 or so for a leg of ham, I have a suggestion. There are these prehistoric-looking birds that roam around the scrub. They are notorious for scratching up people’s vegie gardens and using leaf litter and mulch to make huge mounds, inside which they lay their eggs. Yes, they are protected and indeed endangered (the chicks are left to fend for themselves as soon as they can walk around). But who’s to know if you knock one off, pluck and gut it, stuff it and cook for 17 or 18 hours or until tender? Don’t forget the basil.

Just don’t throw the waste and left-over meat in the wheelie bin and forget to put the bin out. That would be unneighbourly.

*Munted – Kiwi for ‘damaged or unusable.’

*chundering – Oz for vomiting

Christmas 2016

Cucumbers and the silly season

cucumber-silly-season — Photo by Scott Elias https://flic.kr/p/iAVph

All through my journalism career I tried to take holidays at this time of year – the peak summer period known universally as the ‘silly season’ It’s called that, here and abroad, to describe the sudden drying up of real news stories (or even cleverly disguised fake stories). The media must continue on its 24/7 quest for yarns, but the fare becomes increasingly trivial, short on detail and (gasp) exaggerated.

In Australia, the ‘do not disturb’ sticker can safely be slapped across the calendar between December 23 and January 26. This is when all traditional news sources and their spin doctors head for the beach. Businesses close, parliaments and law courts go into recess. It’s down to emergency services to keep the media fed, and there’s a limit to the amount of mayhem holiday-makers can digest through the festive season.

Smoke but not much fire

Here’s a splendid example of a silly season story, introduced by a breathless headline: “Warwick church struck by lightning”. The fire brigade turned out in numbers to St Mary’s Catholic Church, a Warwick landmark, as did spectators. St Mary’s administrator Kathleen Cuskelly told FOMM the fire was not serious but could have been without the call to emergency services by a witness to the lightning strike. The blaze, which damaged two square metres of ceiling above the side aisle, was extinguished by a lone firefighter who found his way in through a back door.

The church-hit-by-lightning yarn certainly livened up the week for weather-watchers, braced as always for a natural disaster but more often left without a real story.

Mariah Carey’s Times Square technically-flawed performance on New Year’s Eve had the celebrity writers rolling in oily hyperbole. Carey described by maxim.com as the ‘golden-throated chart-topper’ was left on centre stage unable to cope with lip syncing which went awry. Someone played the wrong track, leaving the lesser-crested warbler nonplussed. The Daily Mail (UK) summed it up:

“Mariah Carey has stormed off stage after she lashed out during her botched New Year’s Eve performance, after the wrong lip-sync track played.”

That’s a lot of storming and lashing over a relatively tiny tinkle in a teacup. Besides, Mariah sang the hell out of Auld Lang Syne at the start and that’s what counts, right? And she appeared to know all the words.

A few days prior to this earth-trembling news, like so many other heat-stressed people, I was hanging out in the local supermarket, hovering around the deli fridges, a packet of frozen peas clamped to the back of the neck. My mobile chirped and there was a text message: “jar of pickles pls.” Thus challenged, I quickly grabbed a jar, added it to the week’s supply of groceries and headed for the check-out.

The peak summer months, when Europeans and North Americans lock up and head for the beaches, coincides with the cucumber harvest. So their ‘silly season’ is known in many northern countries as ‘cucumber time’.

The ever-useful Wikipedia reveals that in many languages, the name for the silly season references cucumbers (more precisely: gherkins or pickled cucumbers). Examples given include komkommertijd (Dutch), agurketid (Danish) and agurktid (Norwegian, where a piece of news is called agurknytt i.e., “cucumber news”).

There are other examples: the Sommerloch (“summer (news) hole”) in German-speaking countries; la morte-saison (France) and nyhetstorka or news drought, in Sweden.

Media analysts have speculated that people employed as public relations consultants or media advisors in private enterprise and government now outnumber real journalists by five to one. The highly-paid spin doctors take January off and go to the beach. So their carefully crafted “news” releases, sanitised, scrutinised and signed off on by at least 10 people slow to a trickle then stop.

Meanwhile, the skeleton squads left holding the news forts have to forage for items to fill the ironically larger news holes (in the newspaper business advertising also takes a holiday). So the only thing a reporter or a news crew can do is follow the fire engine. On arrival, take emotive video of the cat stuck up a gum tree and hope (though only deep within their craven souls) that the rescuer in the cherry-picker might take a nasty tumble from a great height. The video editor can lip-sync it later and the presenter can do the nodding I-was-really-there-honest footage later. Back to you in the studio, Brian.

Bob Hawke lobbies for nuclear waste (again)

Perhaps the most egregious silly season story thus far was the reporting of comments made at a Woodford Festival talk by former PM Bob Hawke. Mr Hawke said Australia should embrace nuclear power and become a country where the world can store its nuclear waste. Mr Hawke has said this before, many times, but most news reports lacked this kind of background.

Warming up for Woodford, perhaps, Mr Hawke trotted out the nuclear waste trope at Sydney University late last year.

In 2013 he singled out South Australia, a vast and sparsely populated state, as best suited to (underground) storage of nuclear waste.

At Woodford 2016, the 87-year-old former politician employed much the same rhetoric he used when floating the idea in September 2005:

“Australia has the geologically safest places in the world for the storage of waste,” he then told the 7.30 Report’s Mark Bannerman.

“What Australia should do, in my judgement, as an act of economic sanity and environmental responsibility, is say we will take the world’s nuclear waste.”

Then Labor Opposition Leader Kim Beazley sharply responded to the comments by Hawke (who retired from politics in 1992):

“Bob is a respected father figure in the Labor Party, but that’s well outside the platform.”

In 1999, foreign company Pangea Resources tabled a specific proposal to build an underground radioactive nuclear waste storage facility in central Australia. South Australia and Western Australia swiftly responded by passing nuclear storage prohibition acts. Nick Minchin, Federal Resources minister at the time, said an emphatic ‘no’ and Pangea, a consortium of Swiss and British firms, folded up its tent.

Industry website www.nei.org estimates that the nuclear industry has generated about 76,430 tonnes of used fuel over the past 40 years. Most nuclear plants recycle used fuel, which will ‘eventually’ be permanently stored as high-level radioactive waste. US Congress made a pledge in 1982 to build such a facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but the proposal has been ensnared in political wrangling since and was shelved by Barack Obama in 2010. Bloomberg reported in November, however, that a Trump White House would make the permanent dump site a priority.

Finland and Sweden are meanwhile working towards the first permanent radioactive waste sites in the world, the first of which could be operational by 2023.

But as then Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott told the 7.30 Report in 2005 (and little has changed):

“There are a lot of politics in this. Now, right at the moment, we can’t even get agreement on where to put a nuclear repository for Australia’s waste, let alone a repository for the world’s waste.”

Mark Bannerman closed his 2005 report with this apt quote from a Northern Territory woman:

“If it’s safe, take it down to the Lodge, put it under Kirribilli House. I think they’ve got a hide.”

Obama’s last Christmas card

Barack-Obama-family — Image: White House

The first you know it’s getting close is when you receive the first Christmas card. Like many of you, though, we’ve been receiving fewer cards each year as friends and family switch to email and social media.

But it was so nice of Barack, Michelle and the girls to remember us! #dontleave

We are organising a ‘Secret Santa’ gift-giving ritual. This means if there are 10 people coming for Christmas dinner; each person buys one gift to an agreed value. The Secret Santa organiser assigns shopping tasks – “You can buy a gift for Auntie Val. I heard her grumbling last week that her pruning shears have had it.”

So rather than 10 people each spending about $599 (the average Christmas gift spend, according to a Commonwealth Bank survey), you each spend $50 and there’s a good chance the person receiving the Secret Santa gift will get something they actually want/need.

An international survey by ING Bank conducted in October found that 82% of Europeans received one or more gifts in 2015. One in seven (15%) were given something they didn’t appreciate, didn’t like or couldn’t use. The proportions were only slightly different in the US and Australia. Of the 15% who admitted to receiving unwanted presents, more than half kept them anyway. Others gave them to someone else (25%), sold them (14%) or tried to return them to the store (11%).

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has estimated that $798 million of the $8.8 billion spent on Christmas loot goes on unwanted gifts.

There are three basic options if you want to rein in your Christmas gift spending. The family could agree to (a) not buy gifts at all (b) organise Secret Santa or (c) donate money to organisations like World Vision or Oxfam; the latter uses the money to buy practical items for poor African villages. The gift recipient receives a certificate, which says something like, Congratulations (name), you have bought a goat for a village in Sudan. The certificate goes on to explain what a goat can mean for a poor African village. You can pin the certificate to your office noticeboard and feel virtuous for a whole year. (Or as Little Brother says, you could go to a country that doesn’t celebrate Christmas and give the whole circus a swerve.)

Some children get $200 cash and more!

The Australian and Securities Commission (ASIC) website Moneysmart, which aims to educate consumers, compiled an Infographic (see fact sheet link which shows how much money Australians spend on Christmas gifts. The average spent on gifts ranges from $401 (South Australia) to $548 (NSW). Sixty percent used savings when they went shopping, 20% used a credit card, 10% borrowed money from family and friends or used a bonus/tax refund and 10% used lay-by. Of those who used a credit card to pay for Christmas, 80% paid it off within three months.

Nine out of 10 children received some cash as Christmas presents with 20% receiving between $100 and $200 and 22% more than $200! Boys spent the cash on console games (45%), computer games (24%), and other games (22%), put the cash toward saving for a big item (31%) or banked it (43%). Girls spend the cash on clothes (40%), music (22%) and going out (20%), though 29% put the money towards saving for a big item and 45% put the cash in the bank.

Australians will spend all-up around $48.1 billion in the six weeks leading up to Christmas, with this weekend and December 23 and 24 identified as the bonanza shopping days. This massive spend includes $19 billion on food (we all have to eat) and $2.8 billion on on-line shopping. The Retailers Association of Australia and Roy Morgan Research say Victoria will show the biggest increase in spending ($11.6 billion, up 4.6% year on year followed by Queensland ($9.5 billion, up 4.2%).

And if you’re wondering on Christmas Day how Little Johnny could afford to give Dad the boxed set of Game of Thrones, ARA’s research shows that shoplifting will cost retailers $1.4 billion over the six-week period.

Of course buying gifts is only one part of it – then you have to buy wrapping paper and either wrap presents or pay a professional to do it for you. Australian Ethical and Clean up Australia provide some tips for people who feel bad about the 50,000 trees that get pulped every year to make your Christmas gifts look appropriately festive.

Australians use more than 8,000 tonnes of wrapping paper each year and, as Clean Up Australia chairman Ian Kiernan points out, foil sheets are hard to recycle. His suggestions for a sustainable Christmas include:

Rather than buying someone a physical gift like a CD, consider buying them a service, like a singing lesson;
Buy yourself a real Christmas tree – they smell fresh, last well, and are biodegradable through your green waste (they can also be planted out);
Cut back on gift wrapping, resize large cards to make gift tags, get creative with newspaper or magazines for wrapping presents and recycle the wrapping that you can’t use anymore.

“It’s not over till it’s over and you throw away the tree” (LWIII)

There is an unhappy trend to brand someone trying to moderate spending at Christmas as a Scrooge or a Grinch. The inference is we are spoiling the festive season by questioning excessive consumption.

And then there are Christmas cards, which come in ever-diminishing numbers, despite assurances that the market is doing better than ever.

The Greeting Cards Association of Australia says Australians spend $500 million on greetings cards and ours is the world’s third largest market per capita.

In the US, Christmas cards represent about 25% of the $6.5 billion greeting card market, where sales are steady, although profits are declining. Marketing expert Brandon Gaille expects global sales to keep declining as multiple issues confront the industry, including rising postal rates and competition from DIY cards and low-cost e-cards.

The Obama family sent out their last Christmas card this week, which created a sentimental outpouring around the hashtag #dontleave.

The cards are sent only to friends, supporters, White House staff and the media (which explains the hurriedly scanned copies on Twitter, Facebook and just about any traditional media outlet you can name).

The White House can afford to send out at least one million* cards featuring the Obama family’s last hoorah. Since 1960 the incumbent President’s political party has paid for this indulgence.

Back home, listeners told 720 ABC Perth the cost of postage is the overwhelming reason people are resorting to emails, texts and social media messages. I can vouch for this, having spent $70 at Australia Post sending a few calendars overseas and buying a dozen Christmas cards and stamps for friends who don’t do email.

Even though you get a 35c discount when buying card-only stamps, the high cost of postage is pushing more people to compose annual “e-letters” (complete with happy snaps).

But as one ABC Perth listener lamented, “You can’t really put an email on the mantlepiece, can you?”

*Ronald Reagan set the one million White House Christmas card benchmark in 1983 but was upstaged in 2009 by George W Bush Jnr (1.5 million).

Things go better with Santa

By Guest Writer Phil Dickie*

st-nicholas-low-res — Photo by Susan Brown: A sumptuous Saint Nicholas awaits customers in a Berlin department store. He’ll sit with the kids, but you have to take your own photographs.

Think Santa Claus. Think an overweight gent with a white beard wearing a distinctive red coat with white fur trim and a hat to match.

In the English speaking world, that’s it. But while the tubby one is certainly known in continental Europe, he is not alone. Often, he is not even there in the Christmas accessory departments and when you make discrete inquiries you might be told “Oh, you mean the Coca-Cola Santa Claus.”

A rough census through a well-stocked Swiss Christmas department turned up around 40 distinct Santas, absolutely none in the generic costume of the English speaking world. Most had white whiskery bits, but a goatee could be as acceptable as a flowing white beard. Some were even thin, many sported gold and silver threads and autumn colours were certainly popular.

While we have opted for the single depiction Santa, Europe continues to provide some support for the rich, varied and multilayered traditions that lie between a couple of fourth century bishops and a Coca-Cola casting couch. Our Santa, it must be said, doesn’t look very saintly anymore. On the other hand, some of the multiple Santas of Europe also would look much more at home in a pagan romp through the woods than they would preaching from a pulpit.

It is generally accepted that the original St Nicholas was the fourth century Bishop of Myra. A few remnants of Myra have somehow survived the lack of development controls on building greenhouses around the modern Turkish town of Kale – including the mostly Byzantine elements of the basilica where St Nicholas, benefactor of seamen and prostitutes, was buried in 343 AD.

But St Nicholas is no longer there. Freebooting Italians removed his bones, or at least some bones, in the 11th century. Freebooters from Bari just beat freebooters from Venice with an identical plan, so it was Bari that got to follow the usual trajectory of development in those days – bung the bones in a new crypt, build a new basilica overhead and sit back and enjoy the pilgrim trade. Maybe the Venetians were still sore about this when they diverted a crusade against the Muslims into sacking Christian Byzantium (now Muslim Istanbul) a couple of centuries later.

St Nicholas, meantime, spent the centuries appearing, disappearing and performing unexpected miracles all over Europe. To give the pilgrim trade something to fasten on to in a suitably lucrative way, churches, shrines and even villages dedicated to St Nicholas sprang up. But you have got to be careful. A Swiss St Niklaus kirch is just as likely to be for the 15th century soldier, statesman and saint who helped fit the pope up with a Swiss bodyguard. Having arranged a powerful friend, he then advised the infant nation to prosper by leaving the neighbours alone and staying out of their wars.

Other times, the stories are deliciously obscure. The Matterhorn Valley church of St Niklaus (of Myra) was meant to be constructed safely in the middle of a field but the builders kept losing their tools. Then a boy survived a rockfall, exclaimed “Holy Nicholas wouldn’t permit it” and the church was built on the site of this miracle. The church has had an accident prone existence ever since, being flattened by an avalanche in 1720. The 36-metre steeple of the much rebuilt church is now dressed up as the world’s tallest Santa Claus each December – but still looks more bishop than billboard.

Others will tell you that the ancestor of Santa Claus wasn’t St Nicholas of Myra but Bishop Basil of Caesarea. The Roman Empire had many towns called Caesarea but this one is also in modern day Turkey, not that far north of Myra as it happens. Basil, who lived around the same time as Nicholas, is rather better documented in early church records as an actual preaching, politicking and existing cleric than his rival.

In central Northern Europe, children allegedly began receiving mid-winter gifts from a former demon who had turned virtuous under the influence of a usually un-named saint. This may well have been a Christian rewrite job on earlier tales that the undisciplined Norse god Wodin was also uncharacteristically kind to children when the seasons were hard.

A mix of the Mediterranean and the northern traditions is believed to have provided the basis of both the English Father Christmas and the Dutch Sinterklasse. Sinterklasse emigrated to New Amsterdam, and Father Christmas presumably followed when the American city changed its name to New York.

Not even Coca-Cola claims to have created Santa Claus in the modern image, although he was certainly popularised in 1930s advertising designed to lift the mid-winter appeal of refrigerated soft drinks. Coca-Cola, pundits will be delighted to know, was mainly responsible for the girth of the red-robed one, although the artists were trying to convey jolliness rather than the consequences of drinking too much Coke.

The American Santa then travelled everywhere that Coke did, which was everywhere US service personnel were sent or stationed during and after the Second World War. In other words, nearly everywhere there is.

Coke’s artists were working up an image that had been built up by a succession of earlier American poets and artists who transformed Sinterklaas and his English relative into Santa Claus. A satirist gave him a wagon in 1812, a poet turned that into a sleigh in 1821 and another poet added eight reindeer and a preference for diving down chimneys a year later. Santa gave up smoking (a pipe) in 1849, got the basic costume from a commercial artist in 1863 and a North Pole address from another poet in 1869.

“Which Santa sells best?” I ventured to ask Maurice Schilliger, proprietor of the Swiss store where I conducted my census. He wasn’t sure. “I do design, not commerce,” he said. Maybe, but maybe he also majored in diplomacy.

“Er, where are all these Santas made?” I asked. I was thinking, I must confess, of some vast factory floor in China where the proletarian masses are stitching up Santas to any requirement.

“The North Pole,” he said. Of course. Where else.

*Phil Dickie is an expatriate Australian journalist and author best known for ‘outing’ corrupt police and politicians in Queensland. Together with an ABC Four Corners programme, his series of investigative articles led to the Fitzgerald Inquiry in the 1980s and won him a Gold Walkley award. Phil, now based near Geneva, Switzerland, recently concluded a five-year stint as inaugural global issues manager with WWF International and is again available for interesting assignments or employment.

www.melaleucamedia.com.au

(Bob and She Who Is 10% Irish are on holiday!)