What I cooked last night.

This is probably the best Christmas shopping-for-kids idea I've ever heard. Local bookshop Pictures & Pages is having a grown-ups-only night, during which you get to enjoy champagne and nibbles while you walk around the shop pulling books off the shelf and throwing them in a box. You don't even need your wallet; they give you until December 3 to pay, and after that they will keep your book purchases hidden away out the back until you sneak them home on Christmas eve. That will have the kids scratching their heads after they've searched the house for their presents while you're at work. Interfering little brats. * Pictures & Pages 400 Sydney Rd, Coburg Grown-ups only night 19 November 7pm-9pm .

2012 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the first Christmas celebrated in my mother's house. She and my father moved into the just-built house during 1952, after spending the first eighteen months of their marriage living in her mother and father's house in Ascot Vale; the second half of that period with a baby. West Essendon was a new suburb then, with nothing farther west except thistle and the Maribyrnong river valley. Over the years Christmas lunch attendance grew as six babies followed the first, receded as grown-up children pulled up roots and ventured overseas, and then grew again when they returned and settled down and had their own families. We all thought the annual Christmas event would eventually become a moveable feast, but it hung on grimly in Deakin Street, staunchly defending moves to extricate it to new surrounds, failing only one year during the innovative '80s when some brave pioneer thought a Christmas picnic at Brimbank Park might be a good idea. Not a...

My sister is two years and six months in the photo, taken by my father one hot January day in 1966, with date and location written on the back. Question: which Melbourne CBD building hosted this rooftop carnival? The fragment of building in the background may give a clue. Or not. Take a wild guess in comments below. Answer in a couple of days.

It was the second white Christmas in five years, if you count hail. Christmas was back at the golf course after three years. A dozen tables sat under shady umbrellas outside the clubhouse, on a rise of lawn overlooking the fairways. That’s where lunch was supposed to be served. But the rain came first. I watched it come. A little earlier, a massive black thing in the sky way out west had grown larger and loomed over the city, and had then started aiming hail at us as we hit the Eastern Freeway. I thought it might overshoot and fade to the southeast. Wrong. I took the exit ramp at Bulleen Road, crossed the freeway, turned right into the Boulevard, and right again back over the freeway along a narrow bridge road that ended at a steel gate. By this time it was a torrent. The gate slid open and we drove through and stopped out the front of the clubhouse. They were huddled under the eave and inside looking out at the storm. It raged. Way below, the fairways were white carpets sweeping...

Good King Wenceslaus All my childhood Christmases occured during summer heatwaves in a sunburned land characterised by wildfire, burning northerly winds and dust storms. So all those songs about cold and snow and fir trees and medieval kings fascinated me and took me away into a faraway land. Here is a song written in 1853 in Britain by an Anglican minister about a duke, a thousand years earlier, who gave to the poor in Bohemia - in order to teach children about the virtue of generosity in celebrating the birth of a Jewish child in Bethlehem another thousand years earlier - and listened to by a marvelling child in twentieth century Australia. Like a beautiful woven gown circling the world with goodwill down the ages, this song says something about Christmas. And about goodwill to all men. O Come All Ye Faithful As a child I used to think it was O Calm All Ye Faithful and I would think to myself Why are they telling everybody to relax? Maybe it's because tomorrow is Christm...

That’s the end of an era. Two boys at school. Thomas is no longer a pre-schooler; had his school orientation day yesterday, December 6. He doesn’t start officially until February, but he went along for the morning, wearing William’s spare uniform. He had been looking forward to it for weeks. He will be fine at school with the luxury of a brother one class ahead. William was the pioneer, his first weeks at school starting with a huge smile of goodbye at the gate masking wet eyes. We stayed for the principal’s address and walked away and left Thomas around ten o’clock. The morning peak had died and the streets were empty and quiet. Then the church bell tolled, and the sound rumbled across the suburb. Perhaps it was for St Nicholas’ Day. I don’t know. Perhaps they rang it for the new Preps on their orientation morning. Perhaps they were just practising; the bell is being converted to electric operation following restoration of the church after the 2008 fire . * I told the boys th...

After being critical of the role of traditional fare on the Australian Christmas dinner table, it started following me around. First a parcel of cold chicken arrived from somewhere a few days after Christmas, and later a stretch-wrapped platter piled high with cold turkey appeared in the refrigerator at the beach house. I was being stalked by festive poultry. My mother-in-law had been to visit. It must have been her. She always brings things; frozen Lorne sausage, home-made fruitcake, bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label, that kind of thing. The chicken was easy: I chopped and mixed it with good mayonnaise and divided the mixture into three bowls, to which I added (a) cracked pepper and snipped chives, (b) a mixture of chopped capers and celery, and (c) chopped walnuts, a dash of paprika and finely sliced spring onion respectively. This made an excellent New Year’s Day lunch platter of sandwiches on Potts wholemeal, sourdough baguette, and Coles’ brand plain square white loaf. Guess ...

One report said that more land than France and Germany combined is under water in Queensland. That will be your fruit and vegetable crops and your sugarcane, as well as Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Condamine and other towns. A photograph showed a man in a dinghy rowing past the Bundaberg rum warehouse halfway up the wall in front of the polar bear symbol. (Who came up with a polar bear for a rum distiller?) Another photograph showed a snake toiling along the top rail of a fence, and there were reports of people returning to houses full of reptiles. * A couple of nations worth of water, and work continues at the desalination plant down here in the south. A big water pipe would have been good. They built one from near Perth to Kalgoorlie in the 1800s, but that was for the goldfields. Gold got things done. * There was ham last week after all, but it was cold and thickly sliced. It had been a long drive out of town on Christmas day; a kind of reverse peak hour at the wrong time of day o...

A hot afternoon close to Christmas. I was in the car heading north on the Sydney Road hill in heavy traffic, so I wasn’t so much driving as sitting behind the wheel and punching the radio to try to make it play something good. It wouldn’t, so I turned it off instead. The boys were in the back seat finishing off their most recent riot. We were behind a tram and it was inching forward and we were inching forward with it, along with about a million other cars whose drivers were probably all punching their radios. Or texting. The tram lurched forward with an electric whine and we made a whole hundred metres before it braked at Bell Street and I stopped behind it again. Passengers hunched over with shopping bags got down from the tram and laboured across the road to the footpath. Then the tram clanged and rocked across Bell Street through the red, and we stayed right there. The boys, suddenly silent, gazed out the window. I looked at them in the rear vision mirror and followed their gaze ...

It’s Christmas week, so the old traditional turkey-and-ham versus seafood debate is on again. They have to sell newspapers. Without doubt, roasted turkey and ham are unsuitable fare for the middle of an Australian summer day. This is why we drink so much alcohol. You have to stimulate the appetite. Only after three or four gin and tonics or sparkling reds is it possible to stomach the prospect of sitting down at midday in 28 degree heat to what is essentially a cold climate meal of roast turkey with cranberry sauce and stuffing, baked ham with a sweet, sticky glaze, hot roasted potatoes, carrots and minted peas followed by plum pudding with brandy butter sauce, Christmas cake with Scotch whisky, or trifle made from custard and red jelly on a bed of sponge cake soaked in port and topped with two inches of whipped cream, grated chocolate and nuts. Yes, nuts. The official antidote to this Edwardian stodge is seafood, but given interest rates and utility prices, cold lobster salad with m...

It was early evening on the day after the Melbourne Cup. I was walking up Sydney Road towards Dawson Street past the cafes and bars and vintage clothing shops and second hand book stores. It must have been almost eight o'clock. The footpath and road were partially taped off and a large vehicle with a flashing orange light was standing in the blockage and its crane was propped against the Brunswick Town Hall and workers were at the top of the crane in a cherry picker. They weren't putting out a fire; they were hanging the year's first Christmas decorations on the town hall. Merry Christmas. * I came out this morning about five-thirty to get the paper from the shop around the corner and the world was red. It wasn't just in the east. Bars of orange and pink hung in the sky right over to the west. It was gone within half an hour. There is stormy weather expected.

Each year, someone volunteers to host Christmas and this year it was Tracy’s only sister. House in mid-renovation, two teenage children coming and going between her house and her ex-husband’s, two dogs in the back yard and a crowd of thirty to feed. Brave. So off to the mountains mid-morning, before the heavy Christmas day traffic got started. We pulled up to the house on the high side of a valley that is not quite Selby and not quite somewhere else and there was my mother-in-law sweeping the drive, a Sisyphean task in the Dandenongs where it rains eucalypt bark. A kookaburra also welcomed us, sitting on the telephone wire that crosses the unmade road from one side of the valley to the other. He didn’t laugh but had his beak apart as if smiling widely. He was fat and jolly like Father Christmas. He hung around most of the day, perching himself on various trees, stumps and fences. Lunch cranked into action around 2 p.m., in an informal buffet style so you could move around in betwee...

It was the week before Christmas. The wave of humanity surfed the street in search of something it couldn't quite find, probably a shop in which to trade in unwanted money. It's the spirit of Christmas. Tracy paused for a hundredth of a second to bend down and adjust William's hat, causing a woman behind to check her speed. She glared and tutted and overtook at race walk pace and disappeared into the throng. Compliments of the season, ma'am. It was eleven on a Saturday morning. Once upon a time, before we were civilised, shops closed at midday on Saturdays. Then they let them open all day, in order to stop the late-morning rush. Now they just rush all day. William and Thomas's much older sister rang me from Northland the other day. The background noise sounded like eighty thousand elephants stampeding, but it was just the food mall and it wasn't even lunch time. Looking for a career? Forget restaurants. Get into fast food. There's money in it. Earlier I ...