It took me a while to find a jar of mincemeat in the Australian capital. Not because people don’t eat mince pies here, though they do seem a bit less ubiquitous in the city than they are at home. It’s because mincemeat isn’t mincemeat in Australia. It’s more practically called “fruit mince”.
I had been asking the baffled guy in the supermarket for something he’d never heard of. Like most Irish women, I am haunted by the unrelenting standards set by my mother. Most years she would make her mincemeat weeks in advance. Brandied citrus and spice would already be enveloping the house like a duvet by now, as the fruits macerated in their candied juices. The resulting mince pies would last us into the new year, and the flavour remains in some deep cavern in my brain, suspended in amber.
In her memory, and very conscious of my own limitations, I buy jarred mincemeat and add some of her ingredients at home in an attempt to recapture the flavours I associate with Christmas at home. The result is pleasant, but more like grasping at a memory a little pathetically than getting near it.
A lot of Christmas can feel vaguely like this, even when you’re not in Australia, walking through 33 degree sun to get to the supermarket to buy “fruit mince”. This is a strange time of year under normal circumstances. As this country attempts to come to terms with the devastation of a terrorist attack targeting Jewish Australians gathered with their loved ones at Bondi Beach to celebrate Chanukah, nothing feels at all normal heading into Christmas.
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Even when a December proceeds without such horror, when everything is festooned with fairy lights and we all frantically budget to ensure there can be extravagance and mince pies but also rent money when January reels in on a comedown, we experience a lot of “how things ought to be” clashing with “how things are”.
We become attuned to other people’s social calendars, family dynamics and friend networks, quietly comparing our own. We contemplate the loneliness that can come at Christmas even if you do have people to spend it with, and the sense of shame or failure if you don’t, despite the fact that a lack of network or safety net are increasingly common even among young people.
We think about how we’ll muster the courage one of these years to just decide we’re not going to that grim annual work party, or that we want to spend the day in our own house for once. We wonder if other people’s holidays, children and in-laws are more expensive and less intransigent than ours. We fester.
The ideal of Christmas sits uncomfortably next to the reality, and of course it does – the ideal is a story you told yourself back when you were seven and thought Coco Pops qualified as a sophisticated breakfast. The reality of Christmas is a distinctly adult one. It is an exercise in high-level financial, emotional and political strategy. You apportion your energy like someone at the starting line of a marathon.
You must find high ground and defend it against your aunt who says you’ve gained weight, your father-in-law who makes jokes at the expense of your masculinity, or your back-on-the-wagon sibling who sits miserably among a ruddy-faced, imbibing and completely unsupportive extended family keen to avoid looking closely at their own relationship with alcohol.
Christmas can be a dissonant experience. A little like feeling miserable at Disneyland – ‘Isn’t this meant to be great? Why does it feel melancholy and uncanny and as though every relational tension is somehow heightened?’ Equally, Christmas can be an experience marred by the spectre of an unreachable ideal and the guilty feeling that you’re doing it wrong. Like the banal flavour of a second-rate mince pie.
For Irish emigrants in Australia, this feeling is no less there. No doubt, our social media feeds will be cheered by the annual footage of people who make it home for Christmas to surprise delighted family. Teary-eyed mammies and overjoyed dogs welcoming the returning son or daughter always make for a lovely watch at this time of year.
For many, though, both in Australia and at home, this lovely sense of connection just isn’t a feature of this time of year. The people you love are too far away. Or they don’t get teary-eyed with seeing or with missing you. You might be estranged from family, or not have much of one to speak of. Maybe you’re merely not one of those wonderfully lucky people with a large network of supportive people in their life. It’s not a failing, but it’s certainly a disadvantage.
We went through a bizarre political era for about a decade there, when you would routinely read articles from American outlets encouraging you to cut off your granny because her soft Republicanism was possibly a form of violence. The phrase “chosen family” became normalised at that time, but we can still appreciate the idea of spending Christmas with people whose company you value and who feel glad to spend it with you, blood ties or no.
Emigrants are often forced by circumstance to construct a Christmas from the other waifs, strays and far-from-homers they connect with wherever they live. Whoever they can drum up to make roasting a turkey and exchanging some wrapped pairs of socks worthwhile. Whoever they can save from loneliness on a day laden with meaning, or feel saved by in return.
There will be countless tables in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane this year, as well as other big diaspora hubs over the globe, set for an Irish Christmas.
Superquinn cocktail sausages smuggled over borders (I wouldn’t recommend trying but I’m sure someone has managed it). Friends fighting with one another over a foreign Monopoly board as they try to figure out the Sydney equivalent of Shrewsbury Road. “Ah, just put a hotel on it. It’s the Irish thing to do.”
We’ll have a friend visiting us this year, so it will be an international Christmas with my mother’s recipes, thousands of miles from where she would always cook and serve them. An emigrant Christmas can never be what it would be at home. That might be a good or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it.
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