Happy New Year

Why haven’t I posted in so long? I’ve got my reasons, which will be revealed in due time.

Christmas Down Under is a wonderful thing: No traffic jams with scowling faces cutting and flipping you off, no crowds shoving and slamming doors in your face. A few stores were modestly decorated, a few houses along the highway too. Only one person we know bothered with a tree. The Cairns Post published a list of typical holiday activities and compared the numbers of those participating to years past. Fewer people, and there were not many to begin with, do Santa Claus or listen to the Queen’s Christmas Day message anymore. Only a few gifts are given and most often those are just for the kids. The big events, the ones that remain high on the participation list, council-hosted street festivities, company parties, and big dinners with friends and family, are the reasons for the season, after all, it’s summertime.

People unafraid of political incorrectness cheerily wished each other a merry Christmas and if you didn’t celebrate that particular event, no worries, it was the thought that counted. Cards were exchanged between the kids at school like valentines instead of a mass-mailing campaign. We’ve enjoyed a number of visits to various neighbors’ houses for some holiday cheer. It's a simple holiday, only nominally resembling our old consumer-driven, overblown, obligatory gift-giving, empty American Christmas and we are loving it.

Aussies are still testing the waters with Halloween, it doesn’t seem to have caught on very much, and obviously they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, though they are curious about the extra holiday the Americans have sandwiched in between the end of October and their delightfully low-key December 25th affair, and they even have an extra special day added in there, Boxing Day, a quiet sort of government sanctioned re-gifting day, but the big question is: Do Australians ever really cut loose and party? Definitely. First there’s the Melbourne Cup and then there’s New Years Eve. Both involve restaurants, reservations, booze, and fascinators.

As is the case practically every year since we’ve had kids, we stayed home and watched the countdown and chaos on television, and some of us ate a traditional bowl of Hoppin’ John New Year’s Day for good luck, but I’m thinking next year it might be time for a new tradition, maybe a trip down to Sydney to see the fireworks over the harbour.


Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony -- this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.

-- Jean Baudrillard


Nothing says holidays like a cheese log.

-- Ellen Degeneres