Nothing could be further from the traditional ‘White Christmas’ than basking in golden twilight on an Australian beach in 35 degrees C. Well yes I could get creative and go further however the contrast between these two worlds literally poles apart yet sharing the same festive season is profound.<\/p>\n
All through my childhood Christmas time meant sweltering 30-40 degree days, swimming with friends in local creeks, streams and rivers and an annual pilgrimage to the beach. Christmas meant holidays from school, wearing tee-shirts, shorts and sandals, spending hours in the sun, sunburn, bee-stings and grazed knees.<\/p>\n
To me the myth of the ‘White Christmas’ was the stuff of books and Disney movies and Christmas cards.<\/p>\n
As the years flew past the world got smaller, the differences grew greater and my acceptance of contradictions expanded.<\/p>\n
No longer a myth to me having experienced several Christmases with my northern hemisphere families I now can’t help but replace those famous lyrics of Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’ with my own Australian summer version.<\/p>\n
Photo: Robert Rath, ‘Dreaming of a Golden Christmas’, 1\/25s f\/11 ISO160 15mm<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nothing could be further from the traditional ‘White Christmas’ than basking in golden twilight on an Australian beach in 35 degrees C. Well yes I could get creative and go further however the contrast between these two worlds literally poles apart yet sharing the same festive season is profound. All through my childhood Christmas time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7282,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1226,754,68,1010,66,1341,34,71,67,2086,146,72,192,43,2087],"class_list":["post-7281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christmas","tag-australia","tag-beach","tag-beachscape","tag-henleybeach","tag-henleybeachjetty","tag-jetty","tag-landscape","tag-seascape","tag-southernhemiphere","tag-summer","tag-sunset","tag-swimming","tag-twilight","tag-whitechristmas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7283,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7281\/revisions\/7283"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wetshutter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}