The Christmas decorations went up the day Donald Trump’s win was confirmed. Or at least, that’s when I first noticed them, walking into the shopping centre near our apartment, suddenly visually accosted by a fairy light-strewn plastic fir tree.
Australians love a mall, and I can see why. Canberra is a city designed for cars, and consequently rich in parking. People park below and above the Canberra centre, which sprawls across the city centre, before strolling through the doors from the car park in the unspoken leisure time uniform of the Australian capital – a hoodie, shorts and flip flops. At first, this combination baffled me. It seems to guarantee that one half of you – be it top or bottom – is guaranteed to be either too cold or too hot at all times. But people here drive everywhere, and at this time of year they dress for air conditioning, rendering layers a mere sign of good sense and shoes an unnecessary faff when you’re only walking from your car into the supermarket.
In the US, malls are traditionally not located in the centre of a city. They’re the sorts of places you go to buy jeans on discount and designer sunglasses, and or else there’s a strip mall where you can get a pedicure, a burrito, some tap shoes and four litres of magnolia paint for redoing the bathroom. An Australian mall is a lovely experience because they blend shopping for “notions”, things you don’t need (my local one has a Sephora that has almost ruined me financially), with the everyday. You’ll find a big supermarket in there, and a cinema, but also the chemist, where you can get your prescription hay fever medicine (which you’ll be on if you live in Canberra, because the pollen is radioactive). And there’s also a US-style food court, so that if you’re out with a friend who wants sushi and you can’t countenance anything but a burger, everyone is happy.
So often, Australia’s retail culture seems to take the most convenient parts of Europe and the most obscenely oversized elements of the US and blend them. It’s kind of great.
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That day of the US presidential election result was a particularly odd one. Whether you were intrigued, horrified or delighted by the political turn of events in the US, it did give people the world over a sort of uncanny valley feeling. All of us seemed to drift about with the sense that the world now looked very different from the day prior, either because we were blindsided by the election result, or because we weren’t. It was a discombobulating impression. The most I could manage was an ordinary day of work, before heading into the shopping centre to buy lasagne ingredients. If you’re having an out-of-body experience, pasta and cheese may not strictly fix it, but they certainly won’t do you any harm. Australia is so very far from Europe and the US, and yet it is as deeply rooted in the norms, customs and culture of the Anglosphere as they are. It has its own unique culture, and a long-standing indigenous culture even before Europeans came over with plastic fir trees, but, because of its history and its geography, Australia feels very much a blend of different cultural influences.
I’ll never get used to plastic fir trees in summer or having to put SPF sunscreen behind my ears at Christmas
Or, at least, it feels that way to an immigrant who landed on the tarmac at Sydney airport a year ago. Looking at the plastic fir trees would give me a sort of dizzying sense of confusion regardless (it’s 30 degrees out as I write this, and summer doesn’t even begin until December). It forces you to consider the particularly European expression that Christmas has within our culture. Not the religious Christmas many celebrate, and which has its own rich history, depth and meaning, but the more jaded, anxiety-provoking secular retail Christmas which is very detached from its origins but nonetheless pleasing (in part because it remains the one time of year when people aren’t allowed to email you).
The Christmas tree was apparently popularised by the Victorians, though it’s a German invention. Arguably, it has some pagan roots, but since the pagans weren’t big on Christianity, we’ll give Germany the novel credit of being remembered for something nice in history. I’ve read that European Christians who originally came to Australia made do for Christmas trees with native evergreens or fronds of eucalyptus, and that some embraced the change and decorated beautiful Australian plants such as the Bottlebrush or Banksia, which look nothing like anything you might find growing wild at home, to mark the annual holiday.
Now, we live in a far more globalised world, where the lines between culture and place are less defined. The Zara I frequent in the Canberra Centre looks identical to the ones in Dublin (except for the notions one on King Street, which is a very fancy exception). As we approach summer here in Australia, sequinned dresses that sit in shop windows in Ireland – where the cold, dark weather at this time of year renders sequins a joy – stand oddly on mannequins here. The effect is not the same. Day sequins have a very unfortunate, “I’m pursuing a stage career past the point of viability” tone, evoking the precise feeling you have when you’re on a first date and the guy tells you that he lost his mother’s savings on a cryptocurrency called PutinCoin but that “life is about making bold choices”.
[ Laura Kennedy: Australians respond differently to nature compared to Irish peopleOpens in new window ]
Every place has habits, cultural hangovers, modes of doing things. We borrow from other cultures, and we borrow from our own even after they’ve blended with those of somewhere new and become something else. The world is different now, and it’s the same.
Regardless, I’ll never get used to plastic fir trees in summer or having to put SPF sunscreen behind my ears at Christmas.
And, out of loyalty to the women of Ireland, I won’t ever wear sequins in summer.
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