Christmas in the Tropics

Especially when you have a six-year-old with a creative, caring mind

My husband doesn’t remember this story, yet my daughter and I do. It always makes us laugh at Christmas time.

Our daughter has always been imaginative, but never more so than when we were living on Bougainville Island in Papua, New Guinea, and there was much talk about Santa and Christmas.

Santa is always depicted around snow and starlit skies.

It’s hard to get into the festive spirit when it’s hot and damp all the time.

Having said that, I have to admit I had the same ideas about my first Christmas in Australia, given my Scottish heritage, but occasionally nature would bestow on us, a cold, wet and windy Christmas day…but never one with snow.

There are no cold and windy days in the tropics, wet ones yes, but the days remain, warm, and sticky.

Still, this was going to be our first (read, ONLY) Christmas in the tropics, and I wanted our daughter to remember it for all the right reasons.

Our daughter was six at the time, and had read mountains of books about Santa, and chimneys, sleighs, reindeers, snowballs, and overhead sparkling stars.

It didn’t feel like Christmas, she told me.

It didn’t look like Christmas.

But then she said much the same when we lived in Canberra.

But back there it was different.

We put pretend snow on mirrors and outdoor decks.

We decorated trees with lights and added a few garish Christmas elements, not as many as she would have liked, but enough to whet her appetite to some extent.

We’d make shortbread, and Dundee cakes, all tied up with Rattray tartan ribbons, to give to friends.

From an early age she wanted to help wrap Christmas presents. I bought bags, ribbons, and tags to make things easier for her.

She’d sit for hours pondering what to write on the card (she was five), or where to place a decoration or ten!

To me it never really felt like Christmas, but for her it was all she knew, and the more I included her in the preparations, the more she liked it.

I never re-wrote those tags. Nor did I re-stick a wrapping. To me they added value to any present she chose to wrap.

And then we moved to New Guinea, where she swam in the Pacific Ocean, (her Godparents’ back yard, she thought at the time) and had lots of fun.

Every weekend she would spend in their holiday shack, a little blonde girl, with her native ‘sisters’ swimming right on the beach, overlooking the Pacific, a multi-million dollar view, had it been in Sydney.

This was a perfectly-safe thing to do, by the way, because all the villagers looked out for the children.

In time people talked about Christmas approaching, but she couldn’t see it.

The sun shone fiercely!

There was a dearth of fairy lights.

With only one ‘large’ shop in our locale, the rest being tiny locally-owned shops sans Christmas goods and piped music, it was difficult to imagine.

It just didn’t feel like Christmas, she kept reminding me.

She wanted to go back to Canberra, to friends, grandparents, cousins, to anyone at all who represented Christmas.

Once again I tried to engage her in the festivities, bought anything Christmassy I could find to wrap presents up in, and gave her the job of wrapping gifts for teachers and friends.

And then one day she had the best idea. She could wrap the presents up in her bedroom. Would that be okay?

Of course it would be. Why think otherwise?

And so, night after night, she diligently wrapped gifts up in her bedroom, then showed them to us for appreciation.

Christmas got closer and relatives sent gifts from Australia. These were carefully placed by her, under the tree…and moved a hundred times as she saw fit. We had to leave room for Santa’s presents, she assured me.

And gradually it was beginning to feel more like Christmas as we attended school concerts and had carols playing in our home.

On Christmas Eve, we sat around trying to guess what Santa would bring us.

But our daughter was soon spent and asked if she could go to bed early, which was exactly what we wanted to happen as all her presents were downstairs in a room we never used.

As soon as she was fast asleep we quickly got her gifts and filled in the gaps she had created for Santa. We also left her a few clues to find some small presents, after which, we too went to bed.

Very early in the morning, much too early, she excitedly ran into our bedroom to announce Santa had been. We needed to come quickly.

And so we did.

Lo and behold, Santa had come, and much to our surprise, had left presents for us.

My husband and I stole a look at each other. How could this be? It was clear that neither of us had bought for each other, but there they were, gifts of all shapes and sizes, just for us, with her writing on each tag!

“Open them please,” she urged.

How could we resist?

And one by one we opened boxes we had long forgotten about, glassware, cutlery, small ornaments and the likes, things we had brought with us, but had never used.

They had all been housed in a small cupboard, and she had seen fit to re-gift them to us, for Christmas.

We laughed a lot.

We regaled others with the story.

But at the time our hearts were bursting with pride. One little girl had seen a certain simplicity (or was it duplicity?) in the art of generosity, maybe assuming we had forgotten about our out-of-sight possessions.

Whatever was in her head we might never know. One thing was for sure. She could not have faked the joy in the giving she demonstrated that day.

These surely were gifts, lovingly wrapped, hidden away, for that special day, just as we, her parents, had done.

Her Christmas excitement had been relegated to second place, to ensure we, her parents, had a special day too. And we did.

What she didn’t know was that we had decided to break free of our island living, for reasons that don’t belong in this story.

All three of us could now escape our association with the environmental destruction we had noted, perpetrated by the mining site my husband was associated with.

This wonderful Christmas story written by Melissa Corrigan is all about how she learned to let go of her exacting standards , and found herself immersed in the Christmas joys of her children.

And Roz Warren, Writing Coach’s Chicken Soup For the Soul’s story about Christmas for Jewish people.