Tuesday 21 December 2010

Colonising Christmas with false, commercial symbols #Christmas #Horticulture #Flowers


Did you purchase one of these Pointsettias as a Christmas symbol and decoration this year?  If you answer yes, A Very Merry UnAustralian Christmas to you.  You have allowed your Christmas to be colonised by a foreign empire, the United States of America.

You see, that blurb purporting to come from Andrew, the Fresh Food Specialist is not true - at least for Australia and other countries in the Southern Hemisphere.  So here's hoping he knows more about food than he does about flowers.

The Pointsettia you purchased has been specially bred or forced or whatever artificialities can be introduced by horticultural practices in Australia to make money out of the Christmas season for producers and on-sellers of horticultural products. In short, this is no pretty Christmas symbol but a producer-to-consumer driven product.

The Pointsettia is a symbol of Christmas - North of the Equator.  North of the Equator it is winter. The Pointsettia in Australia is a seasonal flower of late Autumn-early Winter depending on where you live.  The Pointsettia is no more seasonal to an Australian Christmas than Hot Cross Buns in January or Christmas Carols in October.


The above is a Pointsettia in all its glory in tropical North Queensland.  It can be a fairly tall bush and the flowers are positioned on long droopy canes.  In Australia, the Pointsettia is a a symbol of a Christian feast - but not Christmas.  They are often used to decorate churches for Pentecost because the red bracts are reminders of the tongues of fire that descended at the first Pentecost in Jerusalem. Pentecost occurs fifty days after Easter and, therefore, occurs in late May (late Autumn) or early June (early Winter).

So let's leave the Americana on the shelves 
and have an authentic Australian Christmas this year.

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