Festivity-lite maybe, but we’ll celebrate Christmas with gusto

You couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to see the back of a year that challenged Australians with bushfires, COVID and then more COVID. We’re so over that virus.

Rebecca Cole and Stewart Wines with kids Coen and Edie. Picture: David Geraghty

You couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to see the back of a year that challenged Australians with bushfires, COVID and then more COVID. We’re so over that virus.

But this is Christmas, a time to count our blessings and hold close loved ones, to be thankful we not only survived but mostly thrived despite all that was thrown at us.

We will gather in happy groups, big and small, to cut the ham and devour prawns, those staples of an Australian festive spread. The plum pudding will be served al dente with ice cream, washed down by a glass or two of chilled white wine, maybe a soft drink. We’ll settle in for the ­duration.

The presents would have been swapped after the kids stampeded for the tree first thing, their eyes like saucers. The living room, littered with torn gift wrapping, will stay in cheerful disarray until Boxing Day.

When we have eaten our fill — and that bit more — we might kick back on the sofa and dial up a movie. What’s it to be? Love Actually? A Sunburnt Christmas? Bad Santa?

If we went to church as a ­surprising number of us do, thronging services on the most joyous date in the Christian calendar, we would have said a prayer for the 908 Australians who died of COVID-19, among 1.7 million victims globally, and those struggling with the virus in Sydney’s northern beaches outbreak.

Sam Smith and Keegan Houlihan with new puppy Oppie. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

It’s a poignant reminder how fortunate we are, in the main, to emerge from 2020 in any state to celebrate. As you share the good cheer, spare a thought for the doctors and nurses on duty, the police and ambos, fireys, the garbage collectors, the checkout staff behind perspex at the supermarket, airline workers and everyone else, sung and unsung, who risked their health and potentially lives to keep the rest of us safe and sustained.

They deserve so much more than our thanks, heartfelt as it is.

Yet with all the best will in the world, this holiday season can’t be, won’t be the same. At Barwon Heads caravan park on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, 90 minutes’ drive south of Melbourne, Stuart Wines and Rebecca Cole are making themselves at home for the fifth year running, hanging stockings for the kids and dressing their van’s canvas annex with tinsel.

Traditionally, a highlight has been the fireworks. Sadly, bringing so many people together was considered too risky and the display was cancelled. “Everybody usually just stands along the boardwalk there and watches them go off … families galore and kids screaming with joy,” Mr Wines said.

They’ve got friends from across the oval dropping in on Christmas Eve, and his sister and her family will arrive from Melbourne on Boxing Day, just like old times.

“It’s nice down here — it feels like its own sort of world … like it normally does,” said Ms Cole, determined to make the best of it.

Bubbly will be on the menu for Dan Ceh and wife Terri Dempsey-Ceh poolside at the Gold Coast. Their travel plans were upended when the Queensland side of the border with NSW slammed shut again: the couple was supposed to be on a Christmas morning flight to Sydney with daughter Bella and her partner for a get-together of the extended family. “We are Christmas orphans this year,” Ms Dempsey-Ceh said. “It’s … heartbreaking. My sister is my sidekick; her kids are like my kids.”

The Thomas family of Sydney had also been hoping to reunite. Cameron has been working in Melbourne and will spend his first Christmas away from the family, his flight home nixed by the Avalon eruption. His parents, Gillian and John, both 87, are dismayed there will be an empty seat at the table for 10, the maximum under revived COVID restrictions.

It won’t stop the roast, though. “I’m English so we’ve always had an English Christmas dinner, with turkey, pudding and the lot — none of this seafood and picnics on the beach,” Ms Thomas said.

Expatriate New Zealanders Sam Smith and Keegan Houlihan cancelled the party in Brisbane they had hoped to throw for visiting relatives from across the ditch. Instead, they will enjoy the hospitality of new friends who wouldn’t let them spend the day alone.

“Things change but we can’t be negative about it. So we just have to make it our own,” Ms Smith said. “Our mates are looking out for us.”

At a campsite along from Mr Wines and Ms Cole’s caravan at Barwon Heads, David Andrew and his three children will fire up the outdoor kitchenette and ­savour the simple pleasures of an Australian Christmas. They’re grateful to be on holiday when in midwinter and early spring it seemed like Melbourne’s COVID lockdown would never end.

“I feel sorry for NSW … because it has backflipped on them, but I am just glad we have done the right thing and it’s cleared up and hopefully stays that way,” Mr Andrew said. “But you can just see how ­vulnerable the world is with what Europe and America are going through … Hopefully we can continue to get the better of it and have a good life.”

Additional reporting: Angelica Snowden, Max Maddison