A summer Christmas Day

What do New Zealanders do at Christmas in the summer time? We've been here 18 months, but we didn't experience a normal NZ Christmas last year. Last Christmas our son, Mike, was here visiting, and we went to Queenstown, a glitzy tourist town, for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day. We stayed in an inner city motel, and spent Christmas day driving up Lake Wakatipu. It's a beautiful memory, but not a typical kiwi Christmas.

This year we rented a house for a week in Te Anau, a town four hours west and a little south of Dunedin. Te Anau is also a tourist town, the town closest to Milford Sound, but our house was in an ordinary quiet neighborhood. You can see just how ordinary the house is. The best part was the upstairs room, the living room, which had a deck with a view. Te Anau is a much more beautiful town than the house would indicate, and I'll do another blog post soon showing some views around town and from Dave's fishing spots.

The photo above was taken on Christmas Day, the only gray day we were there. The photo below was taken another day from the deck, and I've posted it just to give you an idea of the view from that upstairs living room. The tree in the foreground is a cabbage tree, a native New Zealand tree, which was blooming when we were there.

The upstairs living room had an electric heater and a small closed stove with a basket of coal beside it. By the outside door was a bin of coal (with Dave's fishing boots beside it). I read recently that more people in Europe and the US are heating their houses with coal. Lots of people in NZ and in our Dunedin neighborhood do it, and it makes for an odd smell outdoors in the winter. Dave grew up with a coal stove, so it reminds him of childhood. It's a smell I've never experienced before.

One of the funny things about our stay in Te Anau and our experience of Christmas is that our house was SO quiet six of the seven days we were there, but on Christmas Day someone close by played rock music with a very loud bass beat all day long. We could feel the throb of the bass throughout our house

Now, on to the question of what people in New Zealand do on Christmas Day (besides play rock music really loud). Barbecues are the tradition. On Christmas Day I walked over to the park right by our rented house and took pictures. The first picture shows a nearby house with a bunch of people barbecuing. Then the next five photos show people in the park. There was a group playing informal cricket, some people walking a dog, a father and his kids in a go cart, and another small family flying a kite.