Christmas Day in Australia arrives mid-summer, at anywhere from 25 to 35 degrees. Dinner is prawns and pavlova on a beach, the afternoon entertainment is backyard cricket, and the whole event is a standing rebuke to every card, carol and jumper built on the assumption of snow.
The upside-down Christmas
Australians inherited the full British Christmas package and then had to run it in January weather. The result is its own tradition rather than a compromise: cold seafood spreads instead of a hot roast, beach swims and barbecues on Bondi and the Gold Coast, cricket after lunch, and pavlova where the pudding would be. The imagery of the white Christmas — snow, robins, roaring fires — describes a country most Australians only visit.
Carols by Candlelight
Australia’s great home-grown contribution began in Melbourne in 1938: Carols by Candlelight, an open-air Christmas Eve concert at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl that spawned equivalents in parks and amphitheatres across the country. Thousands singing carols outdoors, in shirtsleeves, on a warm summer evening — the British carol service, comprehensively re-engineered for the southern hemisphere.
Source: LoveToKnow and Holafly travel guide
The 30-degree jumper problem
Australians do still wear Christmas jumpers — briefly, for the photograph, with heroic commitment. The genuinely wearable answer at those temperatures is the lightest thing in the category, a problem this site has already studied from the overheated-office angle in jumpers for a full shift:
