Stuff you don't get used to

[echt]

This isn't intended as an Australian thread, nor as a giant piss and moan about anything, but the strange otherness of it all, and the feeling - not a bad one - that it will not change.

Here goes.

Christmas in hot weather. I didn't realise, until I got here, how I was cued by the climate about Christmas. I'd always bad-temperedly put it down to overload on pre-Christmas advertising, but, while such ads are WAY less obtrusive than in the UK, I still find that it creeps up on me as it never did before. By this time in the UK I had all my pressie shopping done; here I'm, like, as DS would say, WHAAAAT?

I can do the Christmas Day stuff, but all the prep time just passes me by.

ooh, I was the Angel Gabriel three years running

because I had a lovely voice that "carried", apparently

(in other words I was a shouty little child)

I was thrown out of the school choir for being 'flat'.

It was humiliating.

I was about 8.

sob

I was a donkey, a comedy donkey.

I am hoping that ds gets to be Mary (all boys school).

I've always hated the way that in Australia, we grow up with this perception that a cold European Christmas is the 'real Christmas'. Fake snow in the windows and all that. I think it is changing but it has always irked me.
When I had my first cold christmas in the UK, I expected to feel that I was experiencing the 'real thing'. And guess what? It felt weird! Not like christmas at all!! My Christmas's are playing outside in the pool, hot weather, prawns, no TV - and most of all, family.
I think the last is the clincher - no matter where you are!