Blog Collab: Christmas Around the World - Australia

I am not much of a Christmas person, but I love living in Australia so much and the chance to share our Christmas traditions through my experience was too good to pass up (even for a mini Grinch 😂).

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

I have teamed up with two other bloggers to share culture and tradition through Christmas! You can find their posts below: 👇

Diamond @ Build a Bears Furever: French Traditions with Gisselle

Maggie @ Maggie's Doodles: An Irish Christmas: What Christmas is like in Ireland!

Honestly, Australia follows a lot of traditions that I've seen Americans do. But the big difference is that we have a summer Christmas, so we needed to change a few things.

Though it doesn't stop us having a roast lunch/dinner (It's quite crazy to do cause the house can get so hot). But it's traditional so we have to do it, you know?

One of my personal favourites traditions we do is to eat a whole bag or even a box of cherries. We also eat other summer fruits, like mangoes, peaches, apricots, etc. For my family, cherries are our go to for Christmas day. It's because my grandfather on my mother's side loved cherries and grew his own trees, plus it's an Australian tradition that my older members of the family grew up on as well. It was so natural for it to be present nearly every single Christmas day, especially when I was a kid.

We also like to set up all our decorations on December 1st. It doesn't always happen, but generally it will. We only decorated inside the house because we live in the country and most people won't see it (though I think it would be cool to decorate outside, if we had enough lights, as we live on a hill near a dirt road which we call the lane).

Christmas day for us as a family basically means opening presents, hanging out and eating food. Sometimes it's a whole fancy extended family gathering or a really casual, just chilling day with close family (parents and siblings). We also have dinner with another family (who my older sister has now married into [since January 2020] so they are officially part of our family 💜) and hang out until really late into the night (basically midnight 😂).

When I looked up Australian Christmas traditions (to see what was just a family tradition or a country tradition), apparently it's an Aussie thing to bring extra snacks or drinks to a Christmas party (though it's common for most parties, not just Christmas.) It isn't required to bring extra food, but if you have thought of making or buying something that will suit the event, then you would. It's really normal, especially Christmas. I can't not think of a time when us or someone else brought food to a Christmas gathering. The internet says it's not, at least for Christmas anyway. 

Generally, we as a family only listen to Christmas music when we are setting up our decorations or on Christmas day. Christmas music is my least favourite part about Christmas by the way (unpopular, I know). 

Other traditions we don't do but super common in Australia is going and hanging out at the bench or having BBQs (though we Aussies have BBQs for any sort of celebration or gathering, haha). It's also likely to find seafood in our Christmas food (just not for us cause not many of us like it in our family). We also occasionally watch Christmas movies in December, though that doesn't happen enough. We are the sort of family who only gets into Christmas on Christmas day. We don't even do Christmas Eve. That isn't common for most Australians though.

What was the weirdest thing you think Australians do? What was the most familiar thing to you? Also feel free to share some of your traditions in the comments down below!

Merry Christmas!