Merry Christmas, and welcome to our Christmas in a summer wonderland. No cold, nasty winters for us through the Silly Season. Summer sun, shorts and thongs! A long, bright Christmas Day. Why waste Christmas half in the dark like our friends in the northern hemisphere where you can have almost eighteen hours of daylight to spend on the best day of the year?
Okay… now, a few translations from the song.
The barbie is the barbecue, so we’ll pretend you didn’t realise that anyway. A Pom is anybody from England. When it comes to cricket, there’s no team we like beating more than the Poms. A snag is a sausage. You have to have snags on the barbie. The border collie in the strip here is actually the Dog from the New Zealand strip Footrot Flats, but we had to slip him in there. A blowie is a blowfly. They’re several sizes larger than the common housefly. You can almost play tennis with them. And Aerogard doesn’t always keep them away from you, either. Around the table you’d all share paper crackers, and inside would be a fortune on a piece of paper to read. Clearly, the lies those things tell are whoppers, they’re huge lies. And lastly, a mozzie is your regular mosquito. The Australian Wave is the action you make when shooing them away from your face.
So… enjoy your Christmas, and we hope you enjoyed today’s strip. Personally, I think it’s one of the best pieces we’ve done so far.
So good to see The Dog again. We miss Footrot Flats. Even though we are Canucks we spent many a summer cruising there in our boat years ago and became big fans of Wal, Cyril, Horse and the others.
By the way, there was a Come-By-Chance in Newfoundland a couple of hundred years before the name popped up again in NSW.
I’m a huge Footrot Flats fan. Absolute love the series. It is a shame it ended, but we don’t want things petering out and losing their charm, eh?
I pinched the name Come-by-Chance from a Banjo Paterson poem, truth be told!