G’Day and Merry Christmas, Mate!

By David Wood

As holidays come, they aren’t usually as strange as mine in Melbourne, Australia midway through a yearlong trip around-the-world.

On Christmas Eve and seeking nontraditional fare, I made my way to Melbourne's superb Royal Botanical Garden along the Yarra River, sat on a hillside, and watched an outdoor showing of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian . The fragrance of the park’s glorious array of flora added to the warm summer night in the Southern Hemisphere. Chuckling, I thought about the cold Christmas of my Minnesota youth or the rain and gloom of Seattle, my current home, in late December.

Along with 700 other heathens, I sat under the stars and watched the hilarious movie on a rented beanbag chair. You have to love a city like Melbourne that would show probably the most sacrilegious movie ever made on Christmas Eve. It’s like showing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on Easter.

My Christmas Day proved to be equally non-traditional. I went to a beach picnic with the family of a local gentleman whom I had met while playing golf at a local municipal golf course.

Christmas was hot and sunny as is most every December day Down Under. My hosts – the Crook family of four – were warm-hearted folks who made me feel like part of their clan. What made this Christmas equally unusual was that the picnic ground was next to one of Melbourne’s nude beaches. Nothing says “Happy Holidays” to me more than a few hundred nude Australians baking in the sun like bunch of Christmas dinner turkeys. These weren’t exactly the same rosy cheeks one finds in the cold Minnesota yuletide.

Being the intrepid explorer I am, I decided to go have a closer look at the sunbathers, strictly as a scientific research experiment. What I discovered is that there is a good reason clothes were invented. Why is it that the people who are quickest to go al fresco are the ones who should be wearing a beekeeper’s suit twenty-four seven? I was hoping for Elle MacPherson, but all I saw was a nude Walton family reunion. Folks, cover up! We’ve got shrimp on the barby over here!

The twenty-sixth of December is Boxing Day in Australia. While Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, Boxing Day commemorates the birth of boxer Mike Tyson. Just teasing, I have no idea what Boxing Day actually is for. It seems to be just another reason to have an extra day of Christmas.

What makes Boxing Day interesting in Melbourne is that every year it’s also the biggest day of cricket in the world. Australia is cricket-crazy and the stars of their national team are household names. We don’t play much cricket in the U.S. because it’s a sport that makes baseball seem as fast-paced as roller derby. The world-famous Melbourne Cricket Ground is one of the sacred arenas for the game and hosted the holiday match between Australia and India – the two best teams in the world. I bought a ticket.

Cricket is similar to American baseball, but where we play nine innings over two or three hours, they play two innings over five or more days! There were 72,000 people there roasting in the sun when the match started at eleven in the morning with the first batter up, and those 72,000 sunburned people were still there seven-plus hours later as that same batter had not been gotten out and was still up at bat! You can go to a cricket match, leave the stadium after the first hour, go home to read the complete works of William Shakespeare, become fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and get a medical degree. When you return, there’s only one out.

The game was a real nail-biter with India up 364-0 at the end of the first day. It can’t get much closer than that! My cheers were for the visitors, mostly because they were the underdogs, and because I was keen to travel in yet-to-be-seen-by-me India.

Cricket is very civilized. They have refreshment, lunch, and afternoon tea breaks. The players wear snappy white pleated trousers. Several of the Indian players were also wearing thick white cable-knit sweaters. Remember, this is Australia, it was the middle of summer and the temperature was just slightly cooler than the surface of the sun. How hot is India that these players feel it’s chilly enough to wear a sweater? It’s 9,000 degrees out, and these guys are scared they’re going to catch a cold?

However, on the plus side, at least they were wearing clothes. Happy Holidays, mate!