Her blue eyes were as light and clear as a child’s and her skin, which never saw the harsh Queensland sun, was pale. Nana Connelly was a small, pretty woman, who wore neat sensible dresses and had her hair set into curls that sat short but soft around her face. My father had forbidden me from buying high-heeled shoes, but I bought the highest pair in the shop anyway and wore them dancing.’ ‘I had some just like them when I was about your age. ‘Those are pretty shoes, Katy,’ she said to me. And, as conversation shifted, darting and eddying the way it does when large families get together at festive times, her gentle voice joined the flow. Perhaps it was the heat that night, or the flickering candlelight, or the Duke Ellington Christmas album on the stereo, but Nana Connelly, who was 86 at the time, said yes to a second glass of champagne. The room was heady with the scent of night-blooming jasmine, a fragrance marked so indelibly in my Christmas memories that I experience a strange, disjointed nostalgia if I ever smell it mid-year in the northern hemisphere. Ivy tendrils were tangled together down the spine of the table, oranges and candles interspersed amongst the glistening leaves, and gardenias floated creamily in shallow cut-glass bowls.
A storm was expected and the air was dense and sultry.
BY CANDLELIGHT AND CONJURE MOVED WINDOWS
The year that I am thinking of now, 2002, was particularly hot, and we had Christmas Eve dinner with the doors and windows wide open in the hopes that we might catch a breeze. Our extended family always made the snaking drive up the narrow mountain road, a tradition that continued as the years passed, until eventually my husband and I were amongst those travelling up the mountain from Brisbane, too. Mum cooked, and we all helped to decorate, laying Nana Martinson’s table and lining it with flowers and foliage from the garden. ‘But how did they know it was my birthday?’ my little December-born sister asked one year, as she gazed, wide-eyed, at the decorations.įor as long as I can remember, we had our special dinner at night time on Christmas Eve, because it was cooler then, and because the festive candles made more sense in the darkness than they did when the sun was blazing. There, we would visit our grandparents – Nan and Pop Morton at Everton Hills, and Nana Connelly on the slopes of nearby Stafford – before venturing into The City to stare in wonder at the window displays of David Jones: elaborate mechanical scenes depicting Santa’s workshop, elves and reindeer amidst giant red balls and baubles. Dad slashed the grass and Mum had the shed clad in chamfer boards and reborn as an antique shop.Įvery year, when the Christmas holidays began, we would make the steep drive down the mountain, across ‘smelly-brake-bridge’ and along the Pacific Highway towards Brisbane. The previous owner had built a boat inside that shed and set sail across the Pacific after selling the house to us.
The garden was overgrown when we moved in, with corpses of abandoned cars hidden in a jungle of towering grasses and giant-leafed creepers, and a big tin shed hunkering in the bottom corner. Home was an old wooden house called ‘Yooroona’, which sat in the middle of a large garden, in a mountaintop village in the rainforest of south-east Queensland. At home, we crowded around the big oak table that had once belonged to my father’s grandmother, Nana Martinson, and pushed cloves into oranges, making pomanders to give to our teachers on break-up day. I adored it all: the seasonal reverence for beloved and beautiful objects, the unusual and particular cooking smells coming from the kitchen, the fairy lights and candles and music.Īt school, we sat in stifling hot-box classrooms, ceiling fans stirring the thick air as we sang songs about robin redbreasts and snow-covered fields, and a little baby in a manger in a faraway place with a magical name. In our family, when I was growing up, it was the pinnacle of the year: the fragile wooden decorations were taken with care from their storage box each December, along with the dried-macaroni masterpieces my sisters and I had made in the past, and strung upon the tree – sometimes a live potted pine that would later be planted in our garden, at other times a particularly beautiful branch that had fallen from a nearby gum and been sprayed with gold or silver paint. If you prefer to listen, rather than to read, you can do so here:
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