I’m Dreaming Of A White Christmas
Part of The Belladonna Holiday Essay Collection
It was 2009, the year I moved out of home and Bindi Irwin lost a major Australian music award to The Wiggles for the second time. Like most summers, it was dry and prolonged; cycle through Canberra’s streets at Christmas and you’d sweat through your t-shirt within seconds, trailed by the smell of eucalyptus and burnt rubber.
That’s how I’d arrived at the house that December afternoon: heart-racing, sweating, and trembling with anticipation. This was it. My university friend had invited me to Christmas lunch in the outer suburbs of Australia’s misunderstood capital city. I was finally going to witness Christmas in the flesh and find out what really happens behind wreath-laden closed doors.
As a first-generation migrant to Australia from Iran, I’d never been privy to Christmas. Picture a shy brown girl growing up in a country town made famous for an annual ute muster. From a young age, I was surrounded by people who didn’t look like me. Things didn’t improve when we moved to another, slightly bigger country town. There wasn’t a lot I felt I had in common with Lucy or Kylie in seventh grade. Wearing the same kind of Billabong boardshorts or butterfly clips didn’t help. Neither did shortening my name, Farzaneh, to one syllable: ‘Fuzz’. Enter Christmas.
Throughout my youth, Christmas was a largely abstract concept, one I only understood in the same way I knew about sex: popular culture. I obsessed over Christmas films and TV specials — mostly the American ones because they seemed less miserable than British winters. Meg Ryan decorating a tree in her bookshop in You’ve Got Mail made me yearn for owning baubles and brightly-knitted jumpers. Frasier and Niles organising Christmas dinner had me longing for snow-covered streetscapes and family dinners, drinking port and toasting to another year of Roz’s sexual exploits. I cackled it at Chevy Chase’s adventures in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation every year it was repeated on free-to-air.
There was something about Christmas that just felt ‘right’. It cheered me up; it allowed me to imagine a world beyond my own lonely adolescence. Like Irving Berlin, I too was dreaming of a White Christmas, “just like the ones I used to know” — but as part of an imaginary white family who bickered about things like toast and where to put the Christmas tree.
If my Christmas fantasies had earned me frequent flyer points, I’d have just flown to New York for free, but there I was: a 19-year-old at a suburban Australian doorstep, about to enter my first Christmas.
In the first year of my undergraduate, I’d heard about Christmas lunch as a rite of passage Australian kids go through over lazy, sunburnt summer afternoons. Smoked meat on the barbeque, the sound of hands scrambling for beer cans in large tubs of ice, that one inappropriate, jolly uncle wearing a singlet that reads ‘Kiss Me I’m Santa’ and swaying to Michael Bublé in the backyard. I was ready to take it all in, every rosemary-scented second, and I knew that once I did, I’d finally feel a sense of belonging. Whatever that meant.
“Are you okay?” was the first thing a bemused-looking woman at the front door had said.
“Oh yeah, totally fine,” I’d laughed a little too loudly, side-stepping the plastic nativity scene on the front lawn I’d just tripped over. I was anxious to make a good impression, half-expecting someone to call me out as an imposter. So did I want to help put tinsel on a tree in a stranger’s living room with five other children, all under the age of nine? Why, yes. Pudding? I took two slices. What I hadn’t anticipated was a plate of prawns, served by the host to a round of polite applause that muffled my question: “Do I cut this with a knife, or twist it like a doll’s head?”
Nevertheless, I hungrily took in my surroundings in the same way David Attenborough might observe a hyena pack at feeding time. “Here you’re about to see,” I’d say to my imagined audience, “human adults drinking what appears to be egg yolk and putting on paper hats far too small for their heads. Fascinating.” It didn’t quite match up to what I’d watched on screen, but it was enough.
*
Before that Christmas lunch, I’d never put decorations on a full-size tree. Over the years, our ‘trees’ at home ranged from: a pot plant, hastily covered in multi-coloured streamers, to an A5-sized crocheted tree I’d made in school and framed at home. My parents humoured me. They put presents under the pot plant. They left milk and treats out for the ‘Rudolph’ — but what uptown reindeers out there prefer saffron, instead of chocolate-chip cookies, I’ll never know. Perhaps they were just happy I seemed happy, though at some point they did use it as an opportunity to send pointed, non-verbal messages (like the year I unwrapped a small box to find a single spray can of Rexona deodorant).
In Iran, the biggest public holiday is Persian New Year. It falls in late March and is calculated on a solar calendar, meaning that you can wish someone a “Happy 1399!” next year in Tehran and not get crazed looks. Like Christmas, you exchange presents during Persian New Year. You visit your relatives, give them warm embraces, express eternal devotion and sacrifice to each other, eat food, then in the car home snarkily evaluate their OTT decorations. There are other traditions, too — growing sprouts, adorning a table with apples, coins and other symbolic items — as well as a casual seasonal blackface character, Hajji Firuz: a cheery serf who enjoys playing instruments and singing to children.
I remember putting my reservations about Hajji Firuz to my aunt one year while we were visiting relatives in Iran. It didn’t take long before we got onto the topic of Christmas.
“Santa?” she had said with a smirk. “That big hairy man?”
Her disdain for Christmas was clear.
“You don’t like celebrating it?” I’d asked, my voice wavering more than I’d care to admit.
“Don’t like it? I don’t think we should do it,” she was adamant.
“It’s a Western construct. It’s important we keep up our own traditions.”
Having grown up in a country where the threat of encroachment — culturally, politically — was an ever-present fear, I could see how she’d scoff at some of the Iranian shopkeepers in Shiraz who decorated their windows with tinsel in December. Preserving and retaining culture sometimes means not letting more dominant ones in, she’d say. This was about a year after That Christmas Lunch, and I’d come to Iran ready to relay all my experiences to my relatives with glee.
But my aunt made me see Christmas in a whole new light. In retrospect, there’s nothing ‘jolly’ about a drunk uncle; he’s just a drunk. Sure, ham’s okay, but have you ever tried fessenjoon? And I don’t care what anyone tells you: eggnog sucks. If it really was that good, you’d drink it all year round.
Why had I wanted to go to Christmas lunch so badly? When I considered my Aunt’s concerns, the images of Christmas lunch were replaced by another one: my parents at home, probably alone, that same afternoon in 2009. It wasn’t the only time I hadn’t seen my family for the holidays; there were years I’d ignored Persian New Year entirely. In chasing a fictional white family where all my problems would be solved, where I’d finally feel okay about myself and place in the world — I had forgotten my own.
Some of my white friends had reservations about spending time with their family, too, but for different reasons. They got annoyed about having to go home over the break, and always wanted to wish me a non-denominational “Happy Holidays!” They’d ask me about “Persian culture” and the Middle East (“What is it really like to live there?”). But for a long time, there I was, just secretly, shamelessly crying to Elf, and wishing I too had an extended family Christmas gathering to complain about.
For over two decades, Christmas meant more to me than just a Hallmark holiday. I had obsessed over it because I was desperately pursuing my own feel-good ending that was easy and made sense. But the reality was that the Christmases I grew up dreaming of, weren’t dreaming of me.
*
How do I reconcile all this with the fact that a small (okay, large) part of me still loves Christmas? Psychologists might say it has something to do with ingrained racism and a desire to fit in, but luckily, I’ll never truly know, thanks to my life-long fear of talking about my feelings (now there’s an Iranian tradition I will always observe).
I still listen to Mariah Carey when I’m feeling sad; I still guiltily watch Love Actually, long after it’s been shelved by its critics. Two nights ago, I re-watched Christmas with the Kranks — it’s not even bad enough to be a bad-good film. Logically, I recognize this. But it’s as though a tiny elf has lodged itself in my brain and rerouted the circuits so that, no matter how godawful a Christmas film is, I’m wired to like it.
“Tim Allen isn’t so bad,” I even found myself saying to a friend this week.
We were standing in a supermarket aisle, arguing over the ingredients for cranberry sauce. The shelves were stacked with premade, boxed panettone: a kind of Italian sugar-filled cake that never goes stale.
As an adult, I’ve come to enjoy hosting my own version of Christmas lunch, recreating the experience through a new lens with close friends. Except for one year I made everyone dress up as Donald Trump for ‘Drumpfmas’ — something which seemed mildly funny in 2015, but since he’s been elected would certainly have me canceled — they’ve been a success. Not because I’m an amazing cook (I’m not), or because I own fairy lights (I don’t), but because I’ve found friends who don’t really care about that stuff either.
“I don’t even know how to make cranberry sauce.” I confessed, “How do you feel about pomegranate molasses instead?” I said, recalling the 5-hour-roasted tofurkey at Drumpfmas that I drizzled with pomegranate molasses. Somehow, hundreds of plastic silver snowflakes I’d used to decorate the table had made their way into the molasses dressing, and my guests had picked them out of their teeth throughout lunch.
“How do I feel about molasses? Better than I feel about Tim Allen,” my friend said.
We loaded our trolley with spinach, pumpkin, cherries, and pomegranates. At the checkout, as the woman scanned the 12-pack Frozen-themed Christmas crackers I’d insisted on getting, she adjusted her glasses.
“Any loyalty cards, love?” she asked.
“Sorry?” I was fiddling with the Christmas crackers and thought she’d said something about ‘royalty bards’. But the woman must have thought I didn’t understand her, so she slowly enunciated every syllable of her next sentence.
“I-saaaid-do-YOU-haaave-ANY-LOOOYAAAALTY- CARDS?”
I did what I always do in this kind of scenario: feign a lack of English. It’s useful when trying to avoid conversations in an Uber, or with Mormons.
“Bebakhshid, err sorry, nafahmidam.”
“HAPPY-HOLIDAYS,” she said, handing me the receipt with a knowing look.
“Yes, thank you,” I said, holding her gaze a little too intensely, and in fake Farsi-English accent, croaked: “Merry Christmas.”
Edraki Farz is a writer and TV producer, currently working for Australia’s public broadcaster in Sydney. She’s written for a number of publications including ABC News, SMH, Crikey, and New Matilda. She worked on a daily satirical TV show, Tonightly, where she earned the nickname ‘Angry Sue’. Only one of the things in this bio is a lie. You can shout Christmas lyrics at her on Twitter: @farzedraki.
