Christmas weathers and moods

One year when I was a schoolboy I remember a neighbourhood sweepstakes about Christmas Day weather: would it break 100 on Christmas Day? That's 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the old scale we used in Australia in those far off prewar days. It was an even-money bet, almost half the time it did, although the really hot weather didn't arrive until after New Year. There must have been more to that sweepstakes than just yes or no to the simple question: the winner would have been the one who made the nearest guess to the actual temperature. Nonetheless, the sort of weather they've had in Adelaide this December didn't happen in the 1930s: in the middle of December there were five days consecutively with temperatures over 40 Celsius in my home town, Adelaide.  That's unprecedented, and a rather convincing bit of empirical evidence to add to all the rest, that climates are changing, that the world is getting warmer. This year the Adelaide forecast is for 39 C on Christmas Eve and 37 C on Christmas Day, with rain - not a very pleasant combination. My son David and his wife Desre are there, renewing connections with his aunt and uncle (my brother Peter) and his cousins and their kids - and cousin Kate's grand-children. His cousin Anne dropped in on us in Ottawa a few years ago but he hasn't seen the other Adelaide relations since 1968, when he was 9 years old. The Adelaide branch of the family is large, rather noisy, the nearest we have these days to a Victorian or Edwardian extended family. My brother has four children, an array of grand children, and three great grandchildren. There are to be several festive meals at different cousin's homes over the 4 days the Canadian contingent will be in Adelaide. I hope the weather is kind to them. I'll be with them all in spirit and wish I could be there in the flesh.

Jenny, Anne, David and Peter Last, Adelaide, Dec 24, 2015

Here in Ottawa we seem certain to have a green Christmas this year, our first really green one, with above-zero temperatures,perhaps a little drizzly rain, as we are having today.

It sets me thinking about weather and moods I've known at other Christmases around the world. There've been Christmases in Adelaide when it wasn't searingly hot, just pleasant, although for sheer perfection, nothing comes close to two or three we had in New Zealand. In Scotland it was still dark when we got the kids out of bed about 8 am, and dark again by 4 pm, very short, gloomy sort of days but not very cold: we never had a White Christmas in our five Edinburgh years although we could see snow on the Pentland Hills south of our home, but we did once in London, or rather with our friends Hazel and Bill Wheeler who lived in Surrey on the southern outskirts. There was a hard frost overnight that froze their pond, and gentle feathery snowflakes in the afternoon and early evening, just enough to cover the ground and decorate the trees. There wasn't enough to make a snowman and we were all too snug by the fireside to bestir ourselves anyway, kids as well as grown-ups. That was the Christmas when we had a small miracle. We were too poor to afford a Christmas tree that year but Wendy brought a dead tree branch indoors, we stuck it in a bucket of sand that we watered a little bit so the branch would stand upright, and decorated it with milk bottle tops that we pressed on the pointed end of our lemon squeezer to turn them into little bells, silver, red or gold, depending on the quality of the milk in the bottle. When we got back from our brief break at the Wheeler's home in Surrey, our bare, dead tree branch had burst forth in little green leaf buds - it wasn't dead after all, just dormant, and it had been warm enough in our house for it to come  to life in a premature spring. Ten years earlier during my first experience of Christmas in London, I was a house officer (junior physician) at Hillingdon Hospital at Uxbridge, Middlesex on duty on Christmas Day, mouth sore after having a tooth extracted a day or two before, heart sore because I'd just been dumped by my girl friend of the time and unhappy, but happy by the end of the hospital festivities, patients as cheerful as possible, and nurses very affectionate. I suppose I've had only one really unhappy Christmas, in 2010, six weeks after my beloved Wendy had died. That's not a bad track record after all these years.