Myer's Christmas Windows

 Level Four Lockdown: Day Forty

Curfew. 8 p.m.
Mood:   Good - it's the weekend

Black and White Photo Challenge: Day Eleven

They've just announced that they are cancelling the Myer Christmas Windows. 

And I say good.

They're creepy. 

Like many things about Christmas, I don't get a lot of the traditions. Like taking a child to see Father Christmas. Also known as Santa, many children are traumatised by being made to sit on this strange bloke's lap and tell them what you want for a gift for Christmas. This is one of the highest forms of child abuse, inflicted on so many children and nobody blinks an eyelid. 

The Christmas Pageant in Adelaide used to be great fun. Okay, I got to be a clown in the pageant one year - dressing up at six am one summer morning, getting tanked on cheap wine and racing around the streets of Adelaide with the rest of the drunk boffins from the department store in which I worked. That was fun. 

I know as a girl, I loved going to the Magic Cave at John Martins. It always felt so big. I'd get a ride on Nipper or Nimble, to very large rocking horses that were housed in the cave. Then I'd be allowed to have a paper Christmas stocking, with a heap of plastic crap and sweets in it. They were the same every year. 

Then I turned five and the kids across the road who were Jehovah's Witnesses told me that there was no such thing as Father Christmas (Santa) and that was the end of that for me. Probably explains a bit. 

The department store, and the Magic Cave are no longer there, but I do remember this wonderful bit of parochial old Adelaide fondly. There was something special about it. 

Anyway, then there is the Melbourne traditions. 

One is Carols by Candlelight at the the Myer Music Bowl. It's very old Melbourne. On Christmas Eve, or there abouts, you get to cram into the space with 20,000 other people, sit on your picnic blanket and sing Christmas Carols. They wheel out Dennis Walters, Sophie Palladino, Marina Pryor, Anthony Callea and The Wiggles for the occasion. If your lucky, somebody who was on Young Talent Time might sing. Under pandemic conditions, cramming somewhere with this many people just sounds odd. 

I don't get these Christmas Carol traditions, but after three years working retail at Christmas as a young adult, I'm a bit allergic to Christmas Carols.

But the Myer Christmas windows, where you get to line up with every yowling child and their bogan parents in the summer heat, waiting for them to get disturbed by whatever the designers of the windows deem to be a Christmas theme that year - these intrigue me even more. 

These themes are getting further and further away  from a Christmas theme each year, the automatons less amazing. 

As my postbox is near Myer, I try check out the windows early. It takes five minutes if you do this before high December - fewer children. No queues. 

And every year I'm thankful I don't have kids who probably would want to see these windows. I think they're tantamount to torture - or at least something, the sight of which will put you in therapy for a  few months.

The Myer windows will be back. But thanks to the pandemic, we get a respite from them this year.

As I said. I don't understand what the fuss is about. 

I find them creepy and weird. 

Today's Song: