I'm a summer person. I love the warmth, the light, and wearing lightweight clothes. I love barbecues, the beach, holidays, and the relaxed pace of life. And, because I am Australian, I also associate this time of summer frivolity with Christmas.
Australian holidays are based on the Christian liturgical year, but being in the southern hemisphere, they are all celebrated upside down. Department stores play Bing Crosby crooning about a White Christmas, we view reindeer decorations and snowmen, then we step outside into the 39 degree heat. We attend outdoor "carols by candlelight" events, which finish before the visible light of the day goes away.
We've imported all the aesthetic trappings of a Northern Hemisphere yuletide winter celebration and plonked them down in the middle of our summer, despite the fact that it makes absolutely no sense.
Australian summer is overpowered. Not just climate-wise, with its scorching temps, deadly sun, and dry wind, but culturally too. We cram end-of-year parties, Christmas, New Year's Eve, school holidays, summer barbecues, and peak beach season into one concentrated burst in December–January.
It is worth highlighting that unique Australian Christmas traditions have developed around our summer celebrations - lunch on the verandah, prawns, pavlova, cherries, and mango. Backyard cricket with the cousins, the post-lunch swim, etc. The sound of Christmas beetles and cicadas are the natural bells of our festive season.
It can be wonderful, but it can also become too much - too busy, too heavy with expectations. And what about people who struggle during this period - dealing with grief, loneliness, or financial stress? The commercialism and social pressure problems that come with Christmas are only amplified when also tied to the expectation to take holidays, travel, and make the most out of summer.
Our actual winter - June, July, August - is this long, grey midyear slump with nothing to break it up. No festivals. No celebrations. Cold and rain dominate, and the year seems to stall. I've often thought if there was something to distract me, like Christmas, it might make the season more bearable. As it stands, it feels like C.S. Lewis's Narnia under the White Witch's curse - always winter, but never Christmas.
There's a reason Narnia's curse was one of deep winter. There's profound meaning in celebrating Christ's birth in winter - the darkest time of year, just before the light begins to return. Early Christians interpreted the incarnation as the "Light of the World" entering darkness, with the winter solstice symbolically showing how Christ brings spiritual illumination into a dark world. But I'm celebrating this on the longest, brightest day of the year.
Easter carries a similar seasonal metaphor. There's a connection between Easter and the spring equinox - historically linked to the Jewish passover and the barley harvest. This time when plants are in abundance provides fitting imagery for the Resurrection, for new life conquering death. Meanwhile Christians in Australia are celebrating as the weather cools, as leaves fall, as things in nature begin to die back for winter. The natural cycle that's supposed to reinforce the spiritual message is running in reverse. The theological metaphors are lost.
There's something about that disconnect that keeps faith at arm's length. When the symbolic language of your religion consistently contradicts your physical experience, it remains abstract, imported, secondhand.
It's ironic, or maybe rather telling, that I'm talking about how the European Christian calendar loses spiritual significance here because it fundamentally works against the physical reality of this land. Meanwhile, Indigenous Australians have maintained deep spiritual relationships with country for tens of thousands of years, with seasonal calendars attuned to these cycles. These aren't my systems to adopt or appropriate. They belong to First Nations peoples. But it seems remiss to discuss spirituality and Australian seasons without acknowledging that sophisticated, place-based spiritual frameworks already exist here - frameworks that colonising Europeans have dismissed while importing a calendar designed for a completely different hemisphere, and failing to learn from First Peoples.
Non-Indigenous Australians have rarely engaged spiritually with the landscape we live in. The Christmas dissonance reminds me that we are still, in many ways, following someone else's cultural template.
Of course there's value in being part of a global Church, in marking holy days together with Christians worldwide, even if our seasons don't align. And it can be especially meaningful for Australians who also identify with another heritage or homeland. But there's value in seeking spiritual meaning from the soil under our feet, the sky above us, and the people and living things that surround us.
Perhaps there are distinct Australian strengths we can lean into. Instead of the solemness of a winter-based Christmas, we are better primed to focus on celebration and community. I was disparaging earlier of carols by "candlelight", but those warm, bright nights that go on forever are an opportunity for gatherings and connection with each other.
You don't necessarily need darkness to celebrate light. You can bask in the sheer power of it. Christmas here is not celebrated in "the bleak midwinter" but at high summer, "as the sun in our skies reaches its height in praise and worship of the new-born Sun of Justice". Such language deliberately links biblical titles for Christ (Sun of Justice) with the lived experience of blazing December days, like a resonant song in an Australian key.
I'll finish with the words of Wakka Wakka woman and Christian leader Brooke Prentis in a Christmas morning reflection, where watching a sunrise can be a prayer and a mediation:
"I'm watching at first light, as the darkness is interrupted with the mixture of those first glows of deep orange and the light pinky purple in the sky, a beautiful gift, lighting the way before dawn... I'm sitting, watching, waiting, with eager anticipation for what artwork God will choose to paint on God's canvas for this new day. So, here I am, today, a new day is dawning, and as our brightest morning star raises its head above the horizon, I remember Jesus was born on this earth, I reflect that Jesus is with us, and I realise I, and you, indeed we, are here, listening, learning, and loving, as we say Come, Lord Jesus! Amen."
Cosplaying winter during summer is stupid. But the dissonance of Australian Christmas goes deeper than that...
— Hannah Shelley, MLIS(Mistletoe, Lights & Inevitable Socialising) (@hannahshelley.site) December 6, 2025 at 10:19 AM
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