It’s nearly Christmas! December is my favourite month of the year because of all the festive cheer. Even in Australia, where we don’t have the typical ‘white Christmas,’ we still have so many unique ways to celebrate. My family has a few time-tested traditions, like barbecuing two whole chickens and exchanging prank presents, but my favourite has to be going to our state’s biggest nursery to buy live Christmas trees. It’s a very long drive, but it’s well worth it. The nursery has an extensive range of hundreds of trees lined up in the ground, ready and waiting for their new owners to choose them. My mum always wants the tallest one. My dad insists on the shortest. We usually end up choosing something in between.
On the way home from the nursery each year, we visit a hardware store near Bentleigh to pick up a few slabs of wood and paint supplies. That’s another of our traditions – building the tree base from scratch. My brother and dad always pair up to hammer together a little wooden pot that’s big enough for the tree trunk, and then we all take turns painting it with our favourite Christmas designs.
The next day, we venture out to an electrical supplies store local to Cheltenham to pick up some new decorations. This year, I convinced mum to buy a string of pretty coloured lights that flash and blink every few seconds. After speaking to a friendly store assistant, my dad also buys some huge, powerful globes to light our front garden and all the giant decorations we’re planning to put there. The decorations are awesome, but sometimes I forget about them – it’s actually pretty scary to get home from school only to be confronted by an inflatable Santa the size of a house. I’m so lucky to have a family that loves Christmas as much as I do!