Christmas in the Colonies

 

Here we are at Saturday and this Saturday I have extracts from the book Christmas in the Colonies.

So identified is England with Christmas and Christmas with England that it seems as though they were made for each other. The Englishman in Australia hails its recurrence with feelings particularly his own.

It reminds him of olden times, never to be recalled and of pleasant scenes, never perhaps to be revisited and of old familiar faces that have passed away for ever, years may have rolled by but still when Christmas Day comes around the sense of separation from native soil and from friends and companions of early days, returns to the heart with scarcely diminished force.

Of Englishmen it has been truly said that dinner unlocks the heart and with equal truth the same may be said of the majority of Australians. We delight in keeping up the sacred festival of Christmas, not only in decorating houses and churches and repeating the message of peace and good will first hymned by the angelic host at Bethlehem.

We kept up the mystery of Christmas gifts as thoroughly as we sing our Christmas carols and we have transferred as a national heritage the home “bill of fare” for merry Christmas as the proper cheer for Christmas.

What though we garland our family portraits with ferns in place of laurels and replaced holly berries with scarlet geraniums, we nevertheless send our plum pudding to the table in a blaze. Even though the sun was shedding his hot rays over the parched grass or well-watered flowerbeds, instead of struggling through dense clouds to light up the snow laden landscape of Old England.