“Oh, some family lives there. Let’s see . . . We went to the big science museum, and drove to the coast and then the mountains. My goodness, was it spectacular.” She prints papers, shows us where to sign, hands us keys.
“Where are you staying in Cairns?” she asks. We tell her the name of our place, and she draws our route on a map. A yellow highlighter squeaks our itinerary to the other side of town. “All right, mates, seems you have all you need, but give me a ring if you need anything. Have a fab time in Queensland!”
The five of us walk through the parking lot to our sedan, arms heavy with backpacks dragging behind us like stubborn dogs, eyelids heavy from the glare of a happy sun. We buckle up in a black sedan, inhale the smell of new car, and fidget with the console buttons to connect the Bluetooth signal to my phone. Familiar bands start playing—Portugal. The Man and Lord Huron. Kyle and I look at each other, wide-eyed.
After three months in Asia, all this feels strangely close to home. Kyle pulls out of the parking lot and heads down the left side of the road, a habit already cultivated from Thailand.
For the first time in our lives, we will celebrate Advent, St. Nicholas Day, and Christmas at summer’s apex. It’s the heat of the yuletide, and we’re sweating to the carols. When we planned this portion of our trip in Oregon, we looked at the map and calculated our general whereabouts for December, realizing we’d be near a culture that recognized the Christian holiday. We have spent a fair number of Christmases in Muslim-majority cultures, and while it’s nice to escape the Western commercialism that’s taken over the season, it’s hard on the kids and conjures aching nostalgia in me. During those holidays abroad I missed “Jingle Bells” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” piping through the grocery store speakers and wishing a merry Christmas to the cashiers.
This is not essential, and grateful for the chance to travel, we were more than willing to forgo a familiar culture during Christmas. But when we first announced to the kids we really, truly would be traveling for a year, the idea was made more palatable to them knowing we could celebrate Christmas in a culture that felt like home, even if it was midsummer.
There’s something about this holiday that evokes a longing for home and belonging more than any other time of year. I am curious, however, if it’s our long-held familial traditions that make us wax nostalgic, or if it’s our customary calendar rhythms. Do we tend to ache for customs of hot cocoa by the fireplace because we’ve gone through the swelter of summer and the decline of fall? Or does Christmas itself imbue us with sentimentality? We will better understand our human longing to be home for the holidays in six weeks’ time, when we leave Down Under and trek back up the latitudinal ladder. Africa is looming.
Of course, a summertime Christmas is only strange to us because we hail from the Northern Hemisphere. In the past, Aussie friends have asked me if singing carols through the snow and curling up by the fireplace to watch Jimmy Stewart is a commercialized cliché, or if it’s a literal thing Americans do. In reply, I asked them why Australians don’t use local palm trees instead of fake evergreens for their holiday tree, or why they haven’t written summertime carols. Their answer: There are, indeed, Australian carols, and a few people do decorate alternative Christmas trees, but for the majority, Christmas is more about the magic, the dreaming, the pretending of a faraway winter wonderland. Santa’s from the cold, after all.
This is Christmas four days after a summer solstice: it’s home with cognitive dissonance. We wear swimsuits on St. Nicholas Day.
I had been to the northeastern state of Queensland, Australia, before, both times on work assignments. I knew the first time I stepped into Oz that my clan would soak up the flora and fauna; the Australians’ love of water; their casual, sunglasses approach to life. From their beer (lager) to their dress (casual), to how they embrace a laissez-faire take on time, most Queenslanders I had met before seemed—well, an awful lot like my people.
They prefer the great outdoors and wearing flip-flops (which here are called thongs), they’re proud of their beer and ice cream, and they employ an inordinately sizable amount of local vernacular in their verbal cadence. My swimsuit is a cozzie, a bather, or togs. Kyle wouldn’t be caught dead in a budgie smuggler, but I’m still not sure if he wears boardies. It takes me several weeks here to learn that my backpack wardrobe also contains a singlet, strides, a cardie, a flannie, a windcheater, sunnies, grunders, a frock, sandshoes, and of course, thongs for wearing in the arvo. A dag I wasn’t, nor was I a bogan.
Reed says a few days after our arrival here: “I like Australians. They almost speak English.”
We’re here for six weeks, and it’s Christmas, so we’re giving ourselves carte blanche to enjoy good things. Good things sometimes show up in life cloaked as guilty pleasures—dark chocolate, well-crafted mattresses, a forgotten show now on Netflix—and like this entire trip, being in Australia feels like luxury. Luxuries, even relished frugally, feel like an homage to an overabundant lifestyle after my decade-long inclination toward thrift.
Ten years after our start of global, nonprofit employment doing important work in hard places, we struggled with letting ourselves enjoy things. Several years ago, when we lived in Turkey, we spent one Thanksgiving in Paris because it was the cheapest international flight out of Izmir. We spent weeks agonizing before buying the tickets. What will people think? Should we overcompensate for going to a fancy place by staying in the sketchy part of town? Perhaps eat Thanksgiving dinner at a cheap café as penance? (Spoiler: there are no cheap cafés in Paris.)
This is still my default way of thinking about luxuries. After earmarking travel money for years, we no longer feel guilty about this round-the-world trip as a whole, but it is still mostly an exercise in frugality. And here we are now, in Australia, right after affordable Southeast Asia. It’s one of the world’s most expensive countries.
Part of our ability to enjoy Queensland our first week here is through a work assignment. I’ll be writing several pieces for the North American division of Queensland’s tourism board, which means our job as a family is to learn how to frugally enjoy northeast Oz, home to some of earth’s most stunning land and seascapes. We will experience some touristy sights and excursions, so guilt-free and in the name of work, we dive in.