One of the few delights in aging is that one can look back and enjoy reminiscences of the past. Perhaps fortunately, we wear rose-coloured glasses when we do that, so the past usually looks at least as good as the present, and often better.
I can't remember whether hotels provided Christmas dinner for people back in the day, but there were fewer hotels back then and very, very few restaurants. I remember that the Blue Gum Café up at the top end of Drouin's main street certainly didn't, though I do remember very fondly the great hamburgers of the past – theirs were always in a toasted bun, always with beetroot. Lovely, and they could be bitten without stretching your jaws. The Blue Gum was about the nearest thing to a restaurant in Drouin.
Of course, I don't remember much about the Christmas cooking. As a child I had little to do with it, other than bringing in firewood. As a male I would not remember much about it, either, because the women did all the work, using a wood-fired stove and open fireplace, in the heat of a Gippsland summer.
I can see why eating at a hotel on the day itself has appeal for many people. To me it doesn't. To me Christmas is in the home. I've had it easy over the years.
The midday meal was a hot one, with 'chook' as the main meat. An old chook or two reaching the end of their egg-laying days would be separated from the flock and fed up for Christmas. The day before Christmas the sacrificial poultry would be decapitated on the chopping block at the woodheap.
It, or they, would be plucked and cleaned, and then they'd be singed over an open flame to remove the small 'hairs' that remained. There was no refrigeration so they could not be killed any earlier. They'd be kept in the Coolgardie safe until the 25th and then they'd be roasted in deep meat trays. That had to be done before lunchtime because we always ate it hot.
One of the fond memories is of the huge Christmas pudding. This was made by mum in October, full of dried fruit and spices. When cooked it would be wrapped in a cloth and hung to mature. Sometimes we had three or four puddings hanging from a broom handle across the corner of dad's office. There they developed a strong aroma, sweet and rich.
Those puddings developed a soft 'skin' inside the cloth. Mum would trim that off before heating the pudding for the great day, and we kids would devour it like any dog pouncing on scraps. I think Mum was often as hot as the pudding. This was drenched with thick yellow custard she'd made the day before. I still like custard but just doesn't have the same rich flavour any more, and while that may be my memory, it was certainly not as sweet as bought custard nowadays.
It had to be custard because there was no refrigerator to keep ice-cream cold, and it was too far to get it from the town on Christmas Day, even if the shops were open.
The pudding would be studded with threepences and sixpences, and even the odd shilling. I remember wondering how Mum got those coins into the pudding. It was years before I realised that they were boiled and then added as the pudding was cut into individual servings.
In turn, that meant grandma had to get the Lux wood stove up to the required heat, and being an iron stove it would radiate enormous heat around the room, often when there was also great heat outside.
All the aunts who'd come up for Christmas would help in that tiny kitchen, and the men would sit outside savouring a rare beer and chatting about how hot it was.
The fat from the roasting – not that farmyard chooks in those days ran too much fat – would be collected in the 'dripping tin'. There were no cooking oils about back then and the dripping was the lubricant for cooking. It also added flavour of its own.
There was no air-conditioning, of course, but we could always open a window to catch a cooling breeze on the rare occasions when there was one.
There were cold meats for the evening meal, which was called tea, not dinner. Dinner was what we now call lunch. I'm not sure how or when those changes came about.
For some reason we never had ham, and we never had turkey, which really tastes pretty much like a wet cardboard box. There was cold roast beef and there was cold mutton. This was before all sheep meat came to be called lamb. Pork never featured, and I can't think why we never had it. Perhaps it was expensive back then, while mutton was cheap.
There were hot roast potatoes (grandma did them so well I can remember the soft white interiors and golden, crisp exteriors) and other boiled things that we all tried to leave, though we rarely succeeded. They were boiled to extinction on the top of the stove where the chooks were roasting, and mum always made us eat them.
As a grandmother she would make my daughter sit beside her at Christmas lunch (the name had changed by then) so she could make her eat her Christmas pudding. Caetlyn hated it, and still does, and I think at times she felt the same way about my mother.
In the evening there were salads, mostly from our own vegetables, freshly made during the afternoon while the men rested. We kids were already hungry again by then after a vigorous afternoon outside in the heat, mostly playing cricket with all the cousins. That was only interrupted by afternoon tea where we each got a glass of warmish cordial and one item chosen from the cake platters that had appeared as if by magic.
Dessert – we called it pudding even if it was not really a pudding – was jelly and cream, for the most part but sometimes there were trifles, an extreme luxury and brilliantly colourful.
I have had many wonderful times in my rather long life and I love going back to them and reliving them. Thanks for bearing with me once again.
I hope your Christmas is a happy one, especially for the children. Let's remember though that it is not a happy time for everyone and that where we can brighten someone else's Christmas we have a duty to do so.
