or: Christmas Decorations in the Southern Hemisphere

There are quite a few things in this world  I still don’t understand.

It’s normally entertaining for me to think about these things yet sometimes, the question remains and it’s good to have some input from others to help further my thoughts and perhaps increase my understanding.

I have mostly spent Christmas in hot climates.

This bit is explainable given I’ve spent most of my life in Australia and then a large chunk in HK where for quite a bit of those Christmaseses, I’ve found myself visiting family and friends in Australia so have dodged the cooler, wet Christmas usually experienced there or I’ve gone somewhere tropical since I’m not going to dive anywhere cold now except for the Silfra Fissure in Iceland.

The bit that I can’t explain is the Christmas decorations.

I am in Mauritius at the moment and this has proven consistent with my observations of other summer Christmasses. I’ve had a Christmas in Hawaii, many on the Gold Coast and Sydney in Australia and a couple of other places there you may have only heard of if you are interested in mining or Australian history, and they all have one thing in common.

The Christmas decorations.

I should be more specific.

In none of these places does it ever snow. Not even in winter. These are warm (by comparison) environments to most other places in the world. Some are even considered tropical.

Yet all of them, without a single exception, feature snowmen (or are we at the stage now where I’m meant to be calling them snowpeople? I don’t mean to offend any snowperson in the writing of this post) and other snow decorations from cardboard snowflakes decorated with mother of pearl glitter  hanging from ceilings through to floors covered in cotton wool or similar pretending to be snow.

Just to be clear, these aren’t Santa / North Pole displays, they are random Christmas decorations not featuring any other North Pole reference so I don’t think it’s this reason there is snow / snowlike substances being featured.

Christmas decorations and seeing how stores and cities display their Christmas wares is one of my highlights of the season. Some are incredibly well thought through, some are entertaining and some have a level of detail that needs to be seen to be believed (I’m thinking of the Landmark in HK for this in particular – it is difficult to top that display each year yet somehow they manage).

The thing I don’t understand is why do these tropical / hot Christmas environments use “snow” to symbolize Christmas when it has never been a feature of Christmas?

It would be more realistic to be featuring sand since many of these Christmases are spent on or near the beach or in a pool.

Is weather appropriation now “a thing”?

The mystery continues…

* Thanks to Irving Berlin for the title to this post. As a piece of trivia straight from Wikipedia, apparently Bing Crosby’s version of this song is the world’s best selling single with over 50 million copies sold.