Month: December 2024

World Series Christmas

A good Christmas doesn’t just happen; it requires the kind of planning usually reserved for major military exercises.  Like so many things in life for me, Christmas begins with a spreadsheet on which I meticulously account for each family member and the gift I plan to give them.  The beauty of this is that I can refer back to spreadsheets from previous years to make sure I don’t inadvertently give the same gift twice.  Depending on the day, this overly officious approach to the most festive day of the year is either endearing or incredibly grating.  Or both.

Christmas is too big to be contained to a single meal or even a single house.  Like my stomach after a third helping of Christmas pudding, Christmas day spreads out.  When we were kids, Christmas morning was always at home.  There’s a subtle kind of agony in the lead up to the big day where, thanks to daylight savings, it feels as if the sun will never get around to setting.  Eventually darkness descends and you wonder whether you’ll ever be able get to sleep or, indeed, whether this is the year that you finally catch Santa in the act.  But I always slept through.

Being the eldest of five children meant that I could leave the dirty work to others.  Younger siblings were invariably up on Christmas day before I was, and they would gleefully volunteer to undertake reconnaissance by crawling up the hallway to the living room with the Christmas tree.  The tree was nothing much – a metal frame that may or may not have once been an antenna, clothed in synthetic pine needles.  We’d had a real tree once or twice, but finding a suitable tree in bushland was a lot of effort, to say nothing of the fact that it’s harder still in the dead of night, which my father judged to be the best time to get a tree whilst still evading detection.  In those circumstances, a fake tree seemed like a pretty good idea.

There are families who, in their passion to liberate their gift, maul the Christmas paper like wild animals.  Not us.  Under the watchful eye of my father, we were expected to remove Christmas paper from presents with the skill of a surgeon.  I hadn’t realised that most families don’t hand their children a scalpel on Christmas morning.  As we went, my father eagerly collected the paper, carefully folded it again in the hope of using it again the following year.  Christmas after Christmas, you’d receive a gift wrapped in the same paper as the year before.  This was in the nineteen eighties, before the term ‘recycling’ had been invented, and my father now claims that he was ahead of his time.

Once the present-opening ceremony was complete, we’d hit the road so that we had almost no chance at all to play with the presents we’d only just received.  Or, worse still, we took the gifts with us, thus creating a risk that we’d leave some vital part behind when we eventually left.  It seems crazy, but taking the whole show on the road to visit our grandparents was our tradition.  That and stale coloured popcorn, chocolate coins and miniature boiled sweets that would be lucky to survive to boxing day.

Things have changed since then.  The older we got, the more complex Christmas became.  If you throw a divorce into the mix, suddenly you’ve get two completely separate Christmases to contend with.  Then everyone gets married or partnered and the complexity factor multiplies.  Soon, Christmas involves seven or eight separate events and takes about a week to execute.  That’s more Mariah Carey and ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ than any one person should have to endure.  Ever.

Now the week between Christmas and New Year is a blur.  In that time, I will wear more paper hats than I will for the entire rest of the year and the top button of my jeans is going to be working overtime under all the additional pressure.  As 2024 falls into 2025, the scent of gunpowder from all the Christmas crackers will linger in my nostrils.  

Life takes unexpected turns.  I now find myself with the company of someone for whom Christmas is the year’s major event.  The tree is real, as are all the insects that live in the tree, as are the pine needles and the resulting hay fever.  But the end result is a fitting monument to the day.  It’s a long way from a re-purposed antenna.  The Christmas playlist gets its first airing a month beforehand and remains on rotation.  I’ll be honest – it’s the only time I ever hear Gene Autry.  And when it’s done, I’m happy to wait a full year before hearing from Gene again.

We no longer re-use the wrapping paper.  It is ripped to shreds in a feeding frenzy.  As I watch the kids open their gifts, I wonder if what I’m experiencing is anything like what our parents went through when we were little.  It’s a glorious thing.  When it’s all done, I save and close my spreadsheet until next time.  By any measure, 2024 has been a long, strange and difficult year.  2025 could easily be stranger still.  But, at this moment, in the shadow of the most spectacular Christmas tree in the Southern hemisphere, I am thankful just to be here.  Merry Christmas to you all.

Notes from Table 29

We were excited.  We unexpectedly found ourselves shortlisted for some songwriting awards and were invited to attend a swanky ceremony in Sydney.  We had to go.  Not that travelling to Sydney is easy.

I am a terrible flyer.  Usually, I’m the only one taking notes during the safety demonstration.  I’m definitely the only person asking questions.  Whilst some might consider this level of attention to detail admirable, it tends to annoy other travellers.   But I had no choice but to fly.  Partly because I was travelling with Katrina, who certainly expected to fly; and partly because there wasn’t enough time to take my preferred mode of transport – walking – and get back to Melbourne before Christmas. 

 We had no idea what to expect from the ceremony.  There was the promise of a red carpet which I assumed a ‘red carpet’ would involve a trail of plush, crimson Axminster leading to the entrance, framed by flashing bulbs and shouting reporters.  In actual fact, it was a space about two metres squared.  It was more a ‘red rug’.  And instead of a pack of photographers, there was one; albeit it was Tony Mott, who is undoubtedly the most renown photographer of musicians in the country.

(You know you’re in for an unusual night when you’re starstruck by the person taking your photo.  It’s possible I embarrassed myself by mumbling something along the lines of ‘you’re amazing’ which, based on the photo he took, Tony didn’t hold against me.)

As first-time attendees, we weren’t sure what to expect.  We certainly didn’t expect to find a program on our table announcing the winners before the ceremony had started.  And so it was that we learned we’d lost before we’d had a chance to take our seats.  If the Oscars operated like this, it ‘d be a much shorter night.  They could, at least, have added the words ‘contains spoilers’ to the cover.  Nevertheless, there was still the possibility of being called onto stage, and on that basis, I decided to make a strategic trip to the gents before our category – ‘Best Comedy / Novelty Song’ came on.

The room was cavernous.  But on either side of the stage, there was an illuminated sign that, in no uncertain terms, told you where to go.  Carving my way through the crowded room, I turned down a small hallway.  The first door I reached had a brass plaque that said ‘Performers’. 

‘How quaint,’ I thought, reasoning that the organisers had decided to use this nomenclature in the same way some bars prefer label their comfort stations ‘Fillies’ and ‘Colts’.  I confidently burst through the door, at which point I was confronted by the sight of a sad and dishevelled cubicle.  It barely seemed sufficient to meet the needs of a busload of people, much less a room of five hundred, many of whom were drinking.

Perhaps I was a little overawed by the occasion.  Maybe I was keen to get back to my seat before our category came up.  But whatever the case, I strode purposefully forward towards the sad little cubicle.  After three metres or so, the wall to my left came to an end, revealing a room with couches and a mirror.  And people.  Standing in front of me was an older gentleman with a long, white beard dressed as a cowboy.  He looked like Santa Claus if, indeed, Santa had decided to go undercover to infiltrate a gang of cattle rustlers.  I should have stopped.  I should have turned around and left.  I should have done anything other than press ahead.

As the door to the cubicle slammed shut behind me, it realised I was not in ‘the Gents’ but somebody’s dressing room.  I could hear murmuring and chatter outside.  Doubtless, they were trying to determine who was currently residing in what might once have been referred to as ‘the Executive washroom’. 

Then there was the matter of an exit.  As soon as possible, I peeled back the door and walked quickly without making eye contact.  I was back on my seat just in time to hear the name of the winner read out, rather than our own.  As the applause died down, the ceremony moved along and they brought out a very special guest.  As people whooped and hollered, Undercover Cowboy Santa appeared on stage and took a seat, ready to be interviewed.  I was mortified.

It turns out that I’d just used the private bathroom of a revered singer-songwriter responsible for hundreds of memorable songs, including the theme song from the TV show, ‘Prisoner’.  Which, given that I’d just been ‘on the inside’ of his dressing room, was kind of fitting.  I withered in my seat, hoping the guest of honour didn’t decide to regale an eager audience with an amusing anecdote from backstage. 

Had I been standing on the red carpet/rug at that moment, I’d have blended right in, such was the scale of my humiliation.  But Allan, as I now knew him, was too much of a class act to use me for comedic fodder.  And for that, at least, I can be grateful.