KEY POINTS:
We do our best to make Christmas antipodean; a dinkum Kiwi affair. Santa gets a Downunder make- over, turning up in ads wearing jandals and shorts.
At some of the more progressive schools, where issues of "culture" and "identity" receive top priority - and sod all that "bourgeois"
stuff like speeling - a total ban is placed on the singing of any songs about snow or bells or one horse sleighs in a winter wonderland, on the grounds that such things are not only irrelevant but possibly traumatising for the sunburnt young.
There are even some in the earnest army so concerned about all this introspective "identity" codswollop that they've actually written special Kiwi carols for the occasion ...
Good King Wenceslas first looked out
On the beach of Stephen
Where the sand lay all about
Deep and crisp and even ...
or ...
I'm dreaming of a bronzed Christmas
Just like the ones in Pokeno
Where the sun block glistens
And children listen
To cricket on the radio ...
Well, fair enough. It keeps 'em off the streets and generates a few royalties, no doubt. Which doesn't do any harm.
But let's be really honest here. If you ever did see a Kiwi in a flamin' Pohutukawa tree you wouldn't tell anybody because they'd all wonder what you'd been smoking.
You can just imagine the disapproving stares as you walked past all the other caravans with your sandy towel over your shoulder and your jandals slapping in that manly and sensual way they do.
Mothers would draw children into the dark interior where the fuzzy telly flickers and blokes you've had a beer with for 17 New Year's eves in a row wouldn't look you in the eye.
It's even possible, when you went to rebook your favourite site for next year, the park owner would just glower at the book and say, "Sorry, it's gone."
So all of these frantic endeavours to create an indigenous Christmas are basically a total waste of time.
Worse still, they can't disguise the fact we've got the whole thing derriere about face, so to speak.
Christmas is, as anyone fortunate enough to miss all those "culture and identity" classes will surely know, a Christian celebration (gosh, there's a surprise) that has, over the centuries, supplanted earlier Pagan solstice ceremonies.
And there's the reindeer rub, deer friends. Wherever and whenever Christmas actually started, we know it's origins are rooted in primal fear - and relief.
Maybe some small clan of Neanderthals were wandering about in waist deep snow just before they were rather thoughtlessly rendered extinct when one of them suddenly noticed the days were finally getting a little longer and warmer and exultantly announced (in a guttural fashion) "Whoopee! We've made it for another year. Let's have a party, guys!!!"
We can only assume someone made the generous mistake of inviting the Homo Sapiens from the next cave and the rest, as they say, isn't history.
But Christmas is, thank heaven - which the vicar always does - and its links to that ancient and elemental celebration where survival itself was the focus, remain buried in the primitive bit of our brains.
The problem we've got is that none of that snow and reindeer and roaring fire stuff makes a blind bit of sense when we've already had our longest day and - in terms of solstices and such - already begun the melancholy descent into "wintry blasts" and "weather bombs" and all those other things the catastrophe maggots in newsrooms love so much.
If we were halfway sensible about Christmas, we'd just say, "Sod it! We're going to do it in July! Might even be able to truck some snow up from Invercargill that way."
And before you say "that's ridiculous!" just put what's left of the scorched almonds down and consider this.
We already play fast and loose with time. We're a nation of Doctor Whos, time-wise. We add an hour here and subtract one there with what used to be known as gay abandon.
New Zealand's a bloomin' Tardis, continually going backwards and forwards in time, no matter the effect on the udders of our Fresians. Our chronometers have got OOS, we're working them so hard.
And if we can play fast and loose with our clocks, then we can jolly well do the same with our calendars. If we're willing to fiddle with the hours, then we can meddle with the months as well.
A committee, that's what we need. An action group, some gummint funding, public meetings, consultation with iwi. Then a Draft Strategic Policy Document looking at important stuff like what would happen to our carbon footprint if we made the mid-winter switch. We need to get crackling - if there's any left. But not now. Not today. Today's Boxing Day - traditionally when them as had plenty shared with them as did not - and we've certainly got plenty of time to worry about all that feasibility study stuff later.
Much later. Now, where's the remote? I'm sure there's a Twenty/20 game on ...
