As you know, I don't hail from these parts. This is the second time I will experience a warm christmas. I was in South africa last year but only for the actual festive period.

My question is, do they market christmas goods using snow and ice and stuff? what i mean is we get advent calenders and stuff at home and they always have scenes of snowy villages and people ice skating. thats appropriate to winter. but what do they do here? have the same thing even though its a million degrees outside? or do they have pictures of santa on the beach?


enlighten me, cos it definately dont feel like xmas time or anywhere near it.

Wow, thats something I've never really taken notice of. Thinking about it, we definitely market the summery side of things, heck, we even had like primary school songs like "Christmas on the beach".

There are more and more summer-themed Christmas things as time goes on - yes, pictures of Santa on the beach etc. And you can go eat leftover turkey at Piha on Boxing Day and soak up the sun (only muppets would hit the Boxing Day sales if the weather is good). But we still have Advent calendars and all the northern hemisphere Christmassy stuff, so rest assured there won't be snow imagery deprivation or anything like that!

That said, you'll know it's really the festive season when you see the blood-red pohutukawa flowers at the beach over summer. (Pohutukawa are also known as the New Zealand Christmas tree.)

"Christmas on the beach,
Christmas on the beach,
Pack the picnic hamper up, we're going to have a feed!
Underneath a big pohutukawa tree,
Christmas - on - the - beach!"

Holy shit that brings back memories. Yeah the pohutukawa in full bloom is one of the definitive signs of christmas in new zealand.

Christmas for me will always bring back the time when one of my cousins went waterskiing in a rented Santa suit... not colourfast.

It was mid-January before they got the last of the dye off him.

The best think about a summer Christmas is that your can have your turkey dinner outdoors, on a deck in the long hours of twilight. Such a dinner can be enhanced by a barbeque.

Hail! Keep up the patriotic reminders.

As said above warm Christmases are awesome. Yeah we still do get a bit of the snow imagery, anything to sell, sell sell! Also, a really cool NZ Christmas thing I have is a CD called "Christmas on the rocks" which came out in 2001 and is various NZ rock bands doing Christmas songs. Some of the songs are good and some are crap but that's not the point. Each year for about a month or two I take it out, dust it off and keep it in my stereo for the Christmas period. It's probably quite hard to find these days, but if you're only in NZ for a short time, and I think you said you were an exchange student somewhere, then I thoroughly reccommend seeing if you can find a copy, might be cool to remember our quaint little country by around the festive season. Ho ho ho!

the year before last i bailed hay on xmas day. it was suprisingly awesome, i rode round on an invented vw beatle engine strapped to a rollcage with 3 gear T shift. it was fuckign fun ripping down the road/field in excess of 150kms a bare 1.5 meters off the ground. :)

1.5cm? 1.5 metres would be scary in a different way...

Heheheheh awesome, glorious days!

Our family sort of does a more British style thing, with an artificial tree, staying inside all day, having a huge breakfast, a huge lunch, and a somewhat smaller dinner. Admittedly we don't do artifcial snow, but I quite like it that way.

Presently we haven't done Christmas in NZ for a while. Being drunk on cheap French Champagne and snoring under a papaya tree's so much cooler.

My christmas is usually organised by my dad. Which means some form of bbq lunch followed by 5 courses of desserts with matched wines, then a sleep in the sun, maybe a swim, then another 5 courses of desserts and wines and cheeses.

My dad rules.

I'm his dad.

The question we've all been wanting to ask you, Yeliah: will you match wines with cheeses, desserts and non-recreational drugs for us on Christmas day?

Dude, I think we all know the answer to that

Ahah. Indeed. Except what's your definition of "non-recreational"?

Like prescribed?

Oh. Then no. Those bastards don't do shit. Recreational it is.

Non-recreational = heavy duty tranquilisers/glass cleaning fluid/industrial fluids/petrol.

(Like any true Futurist, drinking petrol makes you become machine, it takes you to a higher spiritual existence plane that defies the duality between the flawed man, and the perfect machine!)

I got a great book on futurist art today... I'll bring it to the bloggers' dinner. B)

What the hell is the Bloggers' Dinner?

It's a celebration of modernity, Yeliah. It's our rejection of the failures of tradition, the failures of nature, the beauty of machine, and the blog.

I'll post retro-futuristic images when I can be bothered later on.