Batemans Bay, New South Wales, Australia. December 1956. 34°C. Trailed around a wilting tree, Christmas lights blink wanly, paled to near invisibility by the sun that streams through curtains helpless to mute its glare. As flies circle, pine needles abandon the effort of attachment and drift down to join others littered on the sun–faded carpet.
ONE AUTUMN SOON AFTER I MOVED TO FRANCE, MARIE–DOMINIQUE and I took the car ferry to England. On the road to Calais we passed scores of people along the roadside, plastic bags in hand. They were scouring the grass for snails lured out by the moist, warm weather. Back home, the catch would be set out on beds of flour for a few days to cleanse their digestive systems, then baked with garlic, parsley, and butter to create a traditional dish of French cuisine.
Later that morning, we rolled off the ferry and headed for London. Around us, the landscape, the weather, and presumably the snails were identical with those of Picardy. Yet the verges of Kent were deserted.
The same would have been true had we driven into Germany, Switzerland, Italy, or Spain. Only Portugal rivaled France in appreciation of the delectable gastropod. And when it came to scouring the countryside for the freshest examples, the field was left largely to the French.
With the move to France I acquired a kind of double vision, an ability, sometimes troublesome but more often enlightening, to see and appreciate both the Gallic and Anglo ways of life. For the first time, the weather and the seasons, to which until then I’d barely given a thought, became elements in almost every decision I made, social, domestic, or professional.
In California, we had mostly ignored them. Cars were air–conditioned, as were the malls, cinemas, and offices to which we drove. An intimacy with parking facilities was a key to survival, and “Do you validate?” our mantra.
In food, seasonality didn’t apply. Refrigeration meant that avocados, mangoes, and cherries, once available for only a few weeks each year, could be enjoyed anytime, and oysters eaten even in months without an “r” in them, traditionally off–limits as the period when they spawned.
For Australians, a lack of seasonal variation was nothing new. Weather there was largely academic. Sometimes it was hot, at other times hotter. Very occasionally, it was cold. Even less often, it rained. But except for the periodic bushfires, variations were minute. When the American writer Poe Ballantine characterized rural Nebraska as having only two seasons, “merciless summer and a fairly pleasant fall,” he might have been talking about the corner of the outback where I was raised.
To further complicate things, the Australian seasons are reversed. But even in high summer, most people observed the holiday traditions of a wintry Europe. In 1980, eyebrows were collectively raised when Rolf Harris released “Six White Boomers,” a song that proposed an Aussie Santa in a sleigh pulled not by reindeer but by kangaroos. No Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, let alone red–nosed Rudolph? Unthinkable.
There was more than custom in our discomfort with a sunlit Christmas. Something deep in our cultural DNA revolted against the idea. British comedian David Mitchell wrote recently:
When I was at university, we nearly put on a Christmas–themed summer revue. We were planning a sketch show to tour the country in July and August and were racking our brains for a theme when we got very excited about making it a Christmas show, with all the sketches about Christmas and a festively decorated set. . . . The show was to be called “Deep and Crisp and Even” and have a big picture of a snow–topped pizza on the posters. But none of our usual touring venues would take it.
I can understand why. To blot out visions of a snow–covered Christmas took an effort of will not everyone was prepared to make. While a few adventurous souls might celebrate Christmas in Australia with a picnic of lobster and fruit salad within hearing range of the surf, our family, faithful to the European tradition, sat down, perspiring, to roast turkey, brussels sprouts, potatoes, stuffing, and plum pudding with brandy butter.
When the queen broadcast her message on Christmas afternoon, we gathered around the TV to listen. A decade or two earlier it had been the radio, and grandfathers and a few older uncles even stood in respect. Such reverence for the lost British Empire, now reborn as the Commonwealth—Empire Lite—wasn’t rare among that generation, many of whom still spoke of Britain as “home” even when they were born in Australia and had never visited England.
In those days, when theaters and cinemas played “God Save the Queen” after every show, it was an act of reckless courage not to rise to your feet and remain motionless until it finished. If you got through the door at the back of the cinema before the anthem began, you were exempt from this duty, so there was a scramble to leave before the prefatory roll of drums. One irate filmgoer wrote to a trade paper, “Last night, at my local cinema, I stood at the end of the screening for the national anthem. When I turned to leave, I found that the other patrons and even the staff had gone, and I was locked in.”
Like the severed limb that still itched, the sense of a winter Christmas survived no matter to what corner of the world one was exiled. Be it in tundra or jungle, the traditional Christmas dinner would be eaten; the tree decorated; and the carol concerts, midnight mass, and readings or productions of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol all take place. The seasons and their rituals cut deep.
California’s embrace of the new had lulled me into thinking France would be the same. Instead I found it deeply respectful of the past, suspicious of the present, and downright skeptical about the future. Above all, it paid no attention to the rules governing the rest of the world. “The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault,” wrote the social critic Adam Gopnik. My new neighbors and in–laws listened to only one voice: that of what they called le patrimoine—“the heritage”—the accumulated glory of France.