SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Christmas comes hut once . . .

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32778, 1 December 1971, Page 7

SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Christmas comes hut once . . .

I believe there are some highly.organised and motivated people who do their Christmas shopping at the January sales before the event, not after. Which is all very well and laudable if you happen to have that sort of storage and don’t want to give someone an elephant.

These very efficient people also pick up half-price wrapping paper and ribbons and cards so that while the rest of us are getting up enough steam to go out and do something about it they’re sitting at home wrapping things and addressing things and rather meanly estimating what the Christmas giving is costing them compared with what it is going to cost us. But I don’t suppose their methods suit the shopkeepers any better than ours really. This year the Sydney shopkeepers wanted us to do our Christmas shopping in November and avoid the lastminute rush. I can’t really see the logic of that because if everybody shopped in j November all we would achieve would be the transfer of the December rush to November., I suppose you could apply the same reasoning too to that inscription that some unhopeful soul scrawled on a wall at the University of New South Wales, "Fail now and avoid the November rush.”

It might have made more sense to shop in November because it was a fairly cool month and it would have been a lot easier on the feet even though our long-range weather forecaster, Lennox Walker, has extended his gloomy predictions and says

that not only is Christinas I going to be wet, it’s going to |be a long wet summer.

SAVINGS But with a record number of dollars hopefully expected by the shopi keepers to roll into the tills of New South Wales before December 25 perhaps the retailers were anxious to get their hands securely round some of the folding stuff a little early. Australians it seems have been putting rather more of their spare cash into the savings banks lately. They may have been saving up for Christmas but it’s also possible that they may have had the proverbial l rainy day in mind rather than Lennox Walker’s festive one.

Anyway the Father Christmasses were out again and one store ushered in the season with its usual Saturday morning parade which this year included a Chinese dragon, specially imported from Taiwan and needing 20 men to support it. One Santa at least got a new deal with some lighter-weight gear. But another, a veteran of 14 years, said sadly that this Christmas would be his last. Children, he said, just didn’t believe in the magic any more.

And again this year a group of charities got together in a co-operative shop to sell their Christmas cards now estimated to account for 'between 20 and 30 per cent I of Christmas card sales and a real money spinner. Listed among the charitable organisations was one for helping starving refugees although if a Mr Dunn of Kingsford had his way all Government bodies, semi - Government bodies, councils, boards, businesses, professional people and others who send cards round to each other could have helped the starving refugees better by not sending the cards and giving the money to help with Pakistan relief. His estimated $160,000 saved would have given everyone a better Christmas all round, he said. According to the manufacturers of commercial cards the fifth or more that the charities manage to scoop off the card market doesn’t worry them. The sale of Christmas cards is going up even though the postal charges were increased a few weeks ago to seven cents for an ordinary letter or card. CARDS ARRIVING And already the cards are starting to arrive. A group of motorists sent one to a woman constable who controls traffic outside a Carlingford school. They addressed it to “The Silent Cop with the Sweetest Smile, c/o Pedestrian Crossing, Carlingford School.” The store that imported the Christmas dragon took the rose as its Christmas emblem and had red roses, masses of them, dripping in bouquets from their ceilings. For its window displays it took the poem, "The Legend of the Christmas Rose,” based a nativity story on it and animated it into four sequences for its four big windows although with the jack hammers busy tearing up the pavements outside the work, which begins as far back as February each year in an old Erskineville

shoe factory, seemed to be done more in faith than hope.

Christmas entertainment — something that you can take the children to see—took a turn for the better this year with a full-length production of the ballet, “Hansel and Gretel” and a return of I the Australian Marionette i Theatre in Norman Lindsay’s 'story, “The Magic Pudding.” i Last year saw something of a drought in children’s shows.

“Hansel and Gretel” is being danced by the Dance Company of New South Wales at the Orpheum Theatre, Cremome, a theatre which is still filling a great need through its ability and willingness to stage ballet since so many of the Sydney city theatres have gone down. And while it is a fair hike over the Bridge from this side to see it, somewhere in a four-week season it should be possible to find time.

With a wicked witch, a magic flying stool and an absent minded bookworm who has a tendency to slip into German when he isn’t concentrating, this first ballet production of the old story should be worth seeing. Keith Little, who was a member of the old Borovansky Ballet, has produced, choreographed and written the lyrics for the songs. A folk singer, Marion Henderson, wrote the music and with Otto, the green and yellow bookworm, to help sing the songs to tell the story and add a commentary on it. OLD SHOW

a “give way to the left” rule. The Tariff Board gave a Christmas box to Australian makers of Christmas trees and the baubles that go with them by raising the duty on imported trees and decorations from 7J to 30 per cent. Apparently we’ve been getting a lot of our Christmas glitter from Hong Kong, Italy and Taiwan, with the result that, according to the Australian makers, they had an unfair share of the market.

Overseas manufacturers also supply a very large part of the Australian market for candles, which have become big sellers, turning over more than s3m a year and still hoping for growth. It’s a pretty poor dinner table that doesn’t sport its pair of decorative candles when company is expected these days and it’s possible to pay up to $2O for one huge candle if you feel inclined. Possibly as a result of an expanding market making candles has become a paying creative proposition and there are a couple of little shops in Sydney where they make and sell nothing else. Although the people who know about such things—there always seem to be people who know about such things—the Greek shops have the finest and the best, massive white bridal candles used for Greek weddings, dripless, two feet high and a mere 60 cents each. Candles make good pre : sents if you’re stuck with a name on your list and can often be teamed with little holders that cost less than the candles themselves at one of the price-cutting, ailimported shops that seem to have sprung up all over Sydney in the last 18 months or so. One of the latest to open is in Double Bay, two floors crammed full of stuff priced from a few cents to $7O or $BO all pretty original and amusing and sometimes useful. Since it’s opening in time for the Christmas trade 1 think you’ll need sharp elbows round there before the shutters go up on Christmas Eve. WHAT ELSE?

I saw Peter Scriven’s marionette version of “The Magic Pudding” about 11 years ago in Melbourne and thoroughly enjoyed it. Although Peter Scriven is now overseas and a fire where they were stored did some damage to the figures, the show is going on again this time at the Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown just after the New Year. “A more delightful holiday entertainment may never come your way again” say the advance notices and I would agree that it would be hard not to like it, with its characters that look as if they’ve just stepped out of the original Lindsay drawings and the tunes that you suddenly find yourself whistling long afterwards.

Carefully avoiding the sort of thing that is billed largely as a super present for “her” and turns out to be something like a new gas cooker or a clothes drier which by no stretch of the imagination is a present for “her” at all (for “him” it would a lawn mower) what else is there to tempt the money out of our pockets? I see one suggestion j is a box of snuff in a variety) of scents, highly coloured writing paper also scented, soap at $6.50 a box of six. Then there’s a mini folding umbrella called the Teeny Popper. There are English quoits, a portable outdoor sink for camping and picnics, lambskin rugs in pink or gold which, hopes the Nursing Mothers Association of Australia Will replace the traditional bearskins as backgrounds for bare babies. They’re marketed under a brand name that is the aboriginal word for "piccaninny.” A photograph of a new house, the picture decorated with a ribbon tie and bow suggests you might give yourself a present. “Can you imagine a nicer Christmas gift then being able to move mto a brand spanking new house? The firm . . . can supply a package deal which will enable you to celebrate Christmas in your new home

But of course if you want a good tune to whistle there’s always Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” at the Richbrooke—which used to be the Phillip Theatre, which used to be the Phillip Street Theatre when it was in Phillip Street and notable for its revues.

“Anything Goes” looks as if it might still be taking bookings next Christmas. And what else will Christmas bring us? For the motorist possibly a modification of the “give way to the right” rule which has been infuriating native New South Welshmen and puzzling overseas visitors for a good while now. A New South Wales Parliamentarian blaming the rule for a lot of accidents described it as “archaic” and asked the Transport Minister, Mr . Milton Morris if he wasn’t convinced that it should be scrapped. Mr Morris said cautiously that “it could well be” that modifications to the rule might be announced by Christmas, possibly initially as experiments with some alternatives, one of which is said to be

. . .” The only drawback is that you need about $2OOO deposit on your Christmas present and you’ll still be paying for it for many Christmases jto come. , At the other end of the scale if you want a nice cheap and simple present for yourself ’ or someone else, how about a tie-dyed singlet? One maker has just put coloured singlets for men on the market, gold, maroon, I black, • purple, red, and orange, as well as the traditional office white and shearers’ navy. MORE IMAGINATIVE

Some small creative businesses have been dyeing and decorating the white ones with abstract flowers, the big butterflies that seem to have settled on everything, big apples, strawberries, almost anything you like. And I saw one in a boutique dyed to match a blue tiedyed denim pqnts suit, which suggests that the coloured singlets, known as "tankers,” might find a readier sale among the girls than among the men. But what I would really like to know is what that

group of English migrants living in Melbourne is going to do with , itself on December 25. Back in July they decided that Christmas, like the traditional English pork pie, was better cold. So in the middle of the Melbourne winter they decorated the tree, pulled crackers, gave presents and sat down to a dinner of turkey and plum pudding in lan attempt to recreate in a new country the atmosphere of the Christmas they’d left (behind in the old one.

Of course if you want to take this Melbourne-Sydney rivalry thing a bit further you can always wonder out loud and preferably within earshot of a Melburnian why they thought they had to bother. Melbourne’s weather can be pretty unpredictable. They still talk down there, with some feeling of the year, not so long ago, when a spell of fine preChristmas weather turned to a cold rain on Christmas Day. Everybody lit the fire and stayed at home.