How do you reconcile images of snow, laden sleighs and hot, stodgy Christmas dinners in the finest British tradition with a heatwave? The answer is not very well!

Up north of the equator families are snuggling in to warm, cosy rooms lit with a fire, eating turkeys and puddings, in Australia the air conditioning is on full boar, and a total fire ban is in effect. And still we are eating that Turkey (or roast beef) and pudding. Welcome to Christmas in the sun, and the heat. You've got to wonder, are we mad?

Maybe so.

Let me tell you a Christmas tale, just to illustrate my point.

Grand Tradition No.1: The Trek Home

We have to turn the clock back to Christmas Eve, 2001. The day is hot. In fact the week has been just a little on the warm side (read heatwave). Given that it is Christmas Eve, my employer was generous, giving us a half day. I spent it at home. It was too hot to do anything. Breathing was enough of an effort in a house without air conditioning. To encourage air circulation I opened all the doors and windows and laid down on my bed for a nap. It really was that kind of day.

My plans were simple enough: wait for the cool of the evening, and then participate in that grand tradition of the trek to my parent's home to celebrate Christmas. The trek, in this case, was a two and a half hour drive. Not so bad.

Laying there, drifting, I could smell smoke. This wasn't Sydney pollution type smoke. It had the distinctive smell of burning Eucalyptus. It smelt like a bushfire. I live in the suburbs, and there are no green tracts in our area. Lots of gum trees, but not clumped together in such a way to create this kind of smoke. I got up and turned on the TV as a news report came on of serious fires burning on the outer edges of the city. This smoke was coming from twenty kilometres away, at least, and one of the fires was in the direction (but not in a direct path) of the road I had intended to use. This was not good.

I made a snap decision not to wait; I then proceeded to pack the car for the trip. The smoke was getting thicker, which only spurred me on. As I got behind the wheel I realised I hadn't made a decision on which way I would be travelling up to my parent's place. There was a good chance that there would be a fire somewhere along the Putty Road, the route I was planning to take in order to avoid gridlock on the Newcastle Freeway. I closed my eyes, sent a message to Lady Luck and decided to go with my original decision -- the Putty Road.

As I headed toward Windsor I could see the column of smoke rising up from the fire at Kurrajong. This was probably causing the smoke pollution. I stopped for petrol, and worried for a few seconds, and decided not to think about it any more. After all, isn't the best way to make a decision to bury your head in the sand?

Don't answer that.

The video footage to the right shows a fire during this fire emergency in 2001-2002.

The column of smoke I was driving towards looked very much like this. It was a good thing that I was not travelling straight at it. But on with the story...

I know that most people want to believe that when an emergency is thrust at them that they will think rationally and do what needs to be done. It's true, I think, that most people will at least try. We also like to believe that we won't do stupid things.

Ummmm.

It wasn't long before I was past Windsor, and could no longer see the fire. I headed inland, crossing the Colo River, and then up into the mountains. This part of the road is beautiful with gum trees lining and arching over the road which is cut into the mountains. I know the road well; where the curves are and where I have to gun the engine a bit to keep up the revs. I began to relax. The fire was now behind me, and only semi-deserted road which would become relatively flat as I got up onto the tablelands area and only wind down in to hairpin bends at the other end. There was only an hour and a half or so before I was in the Hunter Valley, my destination.

The sky was clear and blue as I passed the Half-way House. It's named this because, well, it's half-way along the road. Look at any Australian map and you'll see we are masters of naming things after the obvious. It's the last place for petrol and the last place with a phone for about 50km, but I'd filled up in Sydney and had no reason to stop, so on I went.

To this day I'm unsure weather not stopping was a mistake or not. It was only about three-quarters of an hour later, just as I was getting into the worst part of the road, that I noticed the smoke haze. Needless to say my mind was by then talking to me in expletives, which included the trivial fact that when there's a fire emergency anywhere, there always seems to a fire in the mountains up here. The more rational part of my brain supplied the answer that I should get out of here fast. That's easier said than done when you are on a winding road, with a cliff on one side, that goes for about 15km. I had to bide my time, and now was not the time to do it.

I took a deep breath, and then a few more for good measure and kept on going. It was a good move. I made it out the mountains and into the Hunter Valley. Almost home. Roughly two hours later the Putty Road was closed, and would not open again for two weeks.

That night, at my parent's home, we stood on the front veranda and watched the fires (yes, plural) burning in inaccessible parts of the mountains in the distance. I couldn't help but shudder thinking what could have happened if I had left it later to leave Sydney.

Christmas day dawned hot and hazy. I'd spent an uncomfortable night with the ceiling fan providing the only relief from the heat. My parents have never seen the need to install ducted air conditioning, despite the heat of summer in Singleton, and only have two wall mounted air conditioners in the house. I rolled out of bed feeling unrested, and headed for the shower. At least the water would cool me down a bit.

Feeling slightly more human I made breakfast and waited on my sisters and parents getting up. You could already feel the heat settling around the house, and there was a slight smoke haze outside. It made me a little jumpy. I planned to drive back to Sydney that evening in order to avoid the Boxing Day traffic, and I was wondering if I wouldn't be able to leave at all.

Thankfully my youngest sister decided to get up in time to distract me, as did my mother, and we instead planned what we would be doing for lunch. As usual, my mother had decided to make a roast with all the trimmings, and to me this seemed perfectly normal.

I need to repeat: Are we mad? Maybe.

Once my father got up the TV was switched on and the morning newscaster announced the bad news: the fires were worse, and overnight there had been evacuations. There were people that would not be having the luxury of a Christmas lunch or dinner. Not only those that had been evacuated, but the firefighters - professional and an even larger number of volunteers in local bushfire brigades that had been called out to fight the fires.

The morning picked up pace with my aunt, uncle and cousins making an appearance. We sat around eating snacks, occasionally watching the news and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Despite the thickening smoke outside and the half burnt leaves falling down outside from the fires 30 kilometres away, we had a pleasant morning exchanging gifts and pretending to laugh at my father's jokes.

Lunch consisted of roast beef, roast vegetables and lots of gravy. All piping hot and tasting wonderful I must say! Thankfully we had the aircon on the coldest setting. Outside you couldn't miss the smoke haze; the wind was gusting and it was somewhere above 40 degrees Celsius (over 100 fahrenheit) by the time we were eating the pudding (my grandmother's recipe). We had the TV on the whole time, watching the updates. I was very grateful that Singleton, which is on the river, had no bushland to catch fire close by. All the land around the town has been taken over by pastoral lands and coal mines. There's not much to burn, except grass, which can be bad enough, but not as devastating as watching Eucalyptus trees explode ahead of a fire, which is what was happening elsewhere.

After lunch we entered that hazy, lazy state of too much food and found places to stretch out, either staring at the TV or sitting out on covered patio at the back, batting away the ever persistent flies. More relatives and friends appeared as the afternoon dragged on at an ever slower pace. About mid afternoon I decided it was time to get moving. I still had the drive back to Sydney to contend with.

The mostly deserted Putty Road was out of the question and instead I headed toward Cessnock, via the Pokolbin vineyards, to take the Newcastle Freeway. The latest news was that the fires had now encroached onto several Sydney suburbs. The green belts in the city were now working against us. It brought back uneasy memories of the 1994 fires, and driving along this freeway with spotfires still burning along the side, after it had been reopened. There had been people stuck in their cars for three days on the bridge over the Hawkesbury River that time... I remembered on guy in his forties quipping to the reporters, "When I got on the freeway I was 21. Look at me now!"

Needless to say I didn't want the same to happen to me. Thankfully the gods were smiling down on me and I made it back to Sydney fine.

I had been home for about half an hour when I got a phone call from one of my friends inviting me over for dinner. They'd seen me unloading my car, and wondered if I could use the company. As darkness descended on Christmas day I made my way over. My friends didn't have aircon and were having the dinner in the back yard. We sat around snacking, and someone got out the guitar, and we all sang, more off-key than anything else, to the songs he was playing.

It was a good night.

Unfortunately what was falling from the sky by then was not snow. It would be two weeks before our lives got back to a semblance of normalcy.

I'm glad to say that most Christmases are not like the 2001 Christmas. The ever-present danger is there since where I live has some of the most volitle bushland in the world. Smoky Cape, on the North Coast of New South Wales, was named by Captain Cook as such because he could see the smoke from a bushfire there. Those are the risks we live with when you live here. They are no better or worse than the risks you take living anywhere.

It seems about every seven years or so we have a particularly bad season.The thing is you get to see the very best of a lot of people under these circumstances. There were over 10, 000 people fighting these fires at their height. Many firefighters drove through the night, giving up the comfort of Christmas with their families to do what they could to help others. They were cheered in the streets as the convoys of firetrucks rolled in from Victoria and South Australia, and cheered again when they finally got to go home.

Christmas is about giving, and these people gave of themselves to help strangers in despair. This is a grand tradition that is not confined to the Christmas season. To them I would like to give my thanks.