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The Steamy Hot Christmas Day, Down Under

© Gay Klok

Christmas Day for me in Tasmania is a wonderful time. But, in our family, we are all traditionalists, so it also means cooking turkey, chickens, plum pudding and a huge leg of ham for anything from 15 to 27 family members, on a day where the temperature may be F86. Not a cool task. Sensible Aussies have a barbecue and then take off to the beach. But then, I am the biggest sentimentalist of the lot.

It is not all bad luck that we are placed, geographically speaking, at the end of the World and live upside down. For instance, our choice of floral decorations for the house and dining room, is enormous. But even on choice of furbelow, family tradition rears its head. For decorating the tablecloth, I always use holly. Unfortunately, the red berries have long gone down the blackbirds' gullet. The first year, faced with this problem, I came up with the brilliant idea to place Jaffa lollies, artistically arranged, amongst the holly leaves running the full length of the tablecloth. Well you may ask, "What are Jaffas?" They are scarlet balls of some teeth-breaking stuff that holds in some hard chocolate. They were the chosen candy of the young boys who used them to roll down the aisles of the picture theatre during the "soppy" scenes. One year the blackbirds were kind enough to leave some berries so I used the real thing; the cry of horror could be heard in the Americas

There is a great range of blooms that we may choose to adorn our houses. The roses are at their peak and I will pick a marvellous, unnamed deep red that was here in the garden when we bought the house 25 years ago. Bunches of the Christmas lily or Madonna lily, "candicum", will perfume all the rooms. I fill cheerful little vases of red primulas and place them through the bedrooms and bathrooms. I have used the bell-shaped clusters of the rich, deep red wall scrambler "Berberidposis", to join the Jaffas running down the long table. With the cool, pure white of the Christmas lilies, I use the red-orange daylilies, "hemerocallis", the flowers so much larger in the modern hybrids. Abutilon "vitifolium" introduces the necessary blue shades to my formal vase arrangements or I may use the pure white form. The bell flowers of the hostas are now in flower and getting Ivy is no trouble, the garden of the Town House is aswamp with "hedera". For mistletoe, I search the clematis vines for fluffy seed heads and call that the "kissing" excuse

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