OPINION
As everyone returns to Tāmaki Makaurau after their holidays, Steve Braunias wishes they’d stay away.
Christmas in Auckland is the best Christmas. New Zealand’s biggest city pulls a conjuring trick, and with a swirl of its cape it turns itself into New Zealand’s smallest town — everyone leaves, everyone heads some place else, and Auckland wakes up one day to find it’s been deserted. It’s a Christmas miracle. In the beautiful absence, the only thing that moved was music. Auckland had an earworm this Christmas and it was Fairytale in New York by The Pogues, given new and terrible resonance by the death of songwriter Shane McGowan. A song of the dead in a graveyard city.
Christmas in Auckland gradually emptied the city in the weeks leading up to Christmas, but the day it woke up to find itself truly deserted was Boxing Day. Everyone who hadn’t already left got up and left that day. Imagine the frenzied packing, the frenzied children, the frenzied pets — really quite a lot of frenzy, until the family car pulls out of the driveway and leaves behind peace, quiet, tranquillity. It was strange to wander the streets on December 26. The desertion felt a lot more profound and devastating this Christmas than ever before. The only thing that moved was the shimmer of heat above the empty pavements.
Christmas in Auckland can be a lonely sort of experience and also kind of lame. Everyone else has somewhere better to go, why haven’t you? Auckland, city of orphans, the left-behind, the unholidayed — the only thing that moves is fomo. You wonder where everyone is, and imagine the fun they’re all having. But then you realise how grateful you are they’re out of the picture. Shayne Currie interviewed media company CEOs for his Media Insider column in the Herald over Christmas; he asked all of them about their plans for the summer break, and one wretch answered, “Collapse on the beach in the Nui with half of the industry.” I suppose “the Nui” is Pauanui. Imagine how dreadful it must be at Christmas with half of New Zealand’s vainest industry talking in loud voices. My heart goes out to local Pauanuians. They should come to Auckland.