A few years ago it seemed it was cool to hate Christmas. This year it seemed it was cool to like Christmas. This annoyed me because I never got around to jumping on the disliking Christmas bandwagon. I have always liked Christmas and at the risk of sounding like the fat fourteen year old girl who always liked bands before they were cool, I’m slightly miffed that my opinion now falls with the majority.

Why is Christmas cool again? Is it an uncertain global landscape of terror, deadly disease and climate change that makes us appreciate our nearest and dearest? Hardly. At least not in my case. It would probably take a polar ice cap melting before my very eyes to rouse me from my glorious palace of apathy.

Christmas is cool again because it has had an extreme makeover. Five gay men have done a number on it and this New Christmas is looking decidedly post-mod, decidedly edgy. Christmas’ fat wife is going to walk through the doorway to their stylish new apartment, sob and group hug a bunch of homos.

The old Christmas, the one that it was cool to hate, hadn’t yet fully freed itself from its stodgy past. You still had to eat turkey, drink eggnog and eat disgusting candied fruit or some other ancient colonial garbage. (If a dessert doesn’t need to be refrigerated, indeed if it is stored in a freaking tin, then it is bound to suck. I’ve maintained this policy for twenty years and it has never done me wrong.)

Over the preceding couple of weeks, the magazines I work for, like magazines across the world, had printed dozens of Christmas recipes. Let me rephrase that. They printed dozens of New Christmas recipes. Christmas Tapas, steamed coriander and coconut mussel pots, cranberry vodkatinis, the list goes on and there’s not a raisin or dried plum in sight. Sometime in the last couple of years, acting under the advice of its new marketing team, Christmas finally broke free from the last vestiges of its ancient European winter tradition. It’s such a simple thought to grasp:  a few centuries ago, in England, food was bad. And yet every year out of the very same ovens that spend the other eleven months baking whole baby snapper, raspberry and white chocolate terrines or kumara and smoked chicken taquitos pours the familiar sight of stringy foreign birds and slow-baked sludge. Out here in the colonies it has been a very slow and painful cutting of the apron strings. If you think traditional Christmas food no longer has a place in urban England then spare a thought for her Antipodean progeny. It was 43 degrees Celsius where I celebrated Christmas in Australia. I couldn’t wait to tuck into that mulled wine and burning pudding.

Now that Jesus has decided to make His birthday parties more closely resemble our own (peer pressure), the whole event starts to look more and more enticing. New Christmas meals don’t have to take eight days to prepare, they don’t have to include raw eggs, candied crap or ‘cake’ that you have to douse in booze and set alight just so that you can choke it down. And the makeover doesn’t end with the food.

I only received one Christmas card this season, which is not that surprising, actually, because I talk to people in exactly the same tone that I write my columns, but the point is the card was nice. Gone are the unsettling oil paintings of three men in dresses and funny hats kneeling in front of a glowing naked boy in a barn (no one else has a problem with this?). My card had a photograph of thousands of Parisian Christmas lights running down towards l’Arc de Triumphe. All class. Yes, it was shaping up to be a good Christmas.

And so, with my department store wrapped gifts crammed into my suitcase I hopped a plane back home to the merry old land of Aus, eagerly awaiting this New Christmas I kept seeing all around me. Sadly, it seemed my mother did not get the memo. In the space of five days I managed to inhale every character in Orwell’s Animal Farm whilst washing them down with a Hemmingway-sized wading pool of alcohol. I even managed a piece of Christmas pudding. (A small piece. Mum just looked so proud of her burning brown mass.) And horror of horrors, I enjoyed every clichéd mouthful of yuletide fare.

There was a small victory for New Christmas though. I managed to sneak in a chilli, lime and coconut dipping sauce for the barbecued prawns on Christmas night. (It proved unpopular.) I figure if it took Christmas over eight hundred years to get to a South East Asian condiment then I’ll just have to be a little patient with the onset of New Christmas. Next year I’m going to try to sneak some caper berries or galangal in somewhere. ‘Tis the season, after all. 

Gordon White lives in Auckland where he drinks heavily and works for the New Zealand Herald. There is a volcano at the end of his street. He mentions this often.