Adela Teubner · December 23 2017
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| Credit: Paula McManus |
My favourite Christmas tradition always occurs late on Christmas Eve, after I’ve stuffed myself with turkey cold cuts and pasta salad at my grandparents’ house, after the sun has set and the lights in people’s living rooms have been dimmed, where the only sound that illuminates the streets is that of the dusty northerly wind whistling through the trees. We drive home from their house through the suburban sprawl, the windows wound down, the air flying in still oppressively warm. We crawl through each street, as fairy lights glitter from the yards of each house we pass, as the kitschy Christmas songs rotating on the classic hits radio station blare from our speakers. ...
I wish it could be Christmas everyday… Glitzy reindeer installations gallop along someone’s roof, snowmen flash silver and red and green from beneath a row of rose bushes...
where the treetops glisten...icicles hang from eaves, blue lights pulsating through their fingers to the beat of whatever is on the radio…
I’ll have a blueee, blueeee Christmas without you...candy-coloured neon glitter darts across the branch of each tree, as thrilling and decadent as big city lights on a foggy night… But of course, there is no use in dreaming for a Christmas white or blue, and the icicles and songs all feel so dissonant and
fake, for the closest thing we’ll get to snow in an Australian December is the heaving of the air conditioner and the constant whirring of the ceiling fan, and this is something I remember as I step out of the car and feel the impossibly hot atmosphere against my sleeveless arms, as I feel the magic melt away into the quivering warmth.
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| Credit: Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas |
But then, I always watch David Bowie and Bing Crosby sing “Little Drummer Boy” via a grainy YouTube transfer once I am inside, a clip so wonderful and bizarre that it carries a certain witchery to it. The young cult icon, among the progenitors of the edgier styles to float along the airwaves of the past 40 years, the elder statesman of an an entirely other era, only a few weeks away from death; the strings thinly shimmering over their voices, trembling with vibrato like the Summer wind; the endearingly awkward juxtaposition of irony and genuity in the opening dialogue, so staged and stilted it feels real; everything surrounded by crackly VHS fuzz, like the flames of a fireplace in the middle of Winter. I walk up to bed, and our old clock strikes midnight or whatever, and I look out of my bedroom blind and I can see the stars and the streetlights and the light arrangements of the houses across the road, and I can still hear David’s voice, and I smile. …
It’s the most wonderful time of the year...
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