You have moved from India to Australia recently and this is your first December in Sydney. You have decided to stay back for the holidays. The flights home are not cheap in December, which makes the decision easier.
From a distance, the month looks familiar enough. Lights go up across the shopping centres, the bakeries start selling cake, churches fill for midnight mass. All very similar. Up close, a few experiences mark out December in Sydney. You might recognise the traditions, but the way this city celebrates them is distinctly its own.
Most of them happen outside, where every Sydneysider is from the first week of the month, because December here is summer. You will see them cheering a yacht race from the headlands one afternoon and out on a dinner cruise another night. Read on to find five such Sydney experiences you will be seeing for the first time this December.
Carols In The Domain
Back home, the carols travel. A choir walks up the lane, sings at the gate, takes tea and moves on. Here you go to the carols, and what you find is a concert. Pop singers, a full orchestra, a choir behind them, and Santa, who has appeared every year since the event began in 1983.
It happens in The Domain, a stretch of open parkland beside the Royal Botanic Garden in the middle of the city. People arrive in the afternoon with picnic rugs, claim a patch of grass and settle in well before the concert begins. As daylight fades, the candles come out and the park takes on a different character, with thousands of people waiting for the music to start.
The Festive Lawn is free to enter. Seats nearer the stage are ticketed. The candles come out once it is dark, sold on the night by The Salvation Army, the Christian charity that runs the event, and the money goes to its youth services.
Christmas Party Cruise
Your December will involve at least one of these: either as the year-end office party, or a night out your friends put together, and the venue turns out to be a boat.
Back home, the year-end celebrations are done on a rooftop, a pub, somebody’s farmhouse, or a beach if you are lucky. Never the water. Here the water is the first thing anybody thinks of, and by the second week of December the harbour fills with boats running parties every night.
Christmas party cruises in Sydney run through late November and December. Once you’re on board, the harbour becomes part of the evening. Dinner is served as the skyline moves past the windows, and when the music draws people outside, the open deck becomes a place to watch the city lights stretch along the water. The Opera House and Harbour Bridge aren’t just the backdrop for the party; they keep appearing from different angles as the boat moves.
By the time you are back on dry land, you will have taken more photographs than you did at any party back home, and most of them will have the Opera House somewhere in the background.
Seafood Barbie
Christmas Day lunch here is cold prawns and a barbecue in the backyard.
That sentence undoes every newcomer. Nothing is roasting in the oven and nobody is sitting at a dining table, because in the middle of an Australian summer a hot meal indoors makes very little sense. So the food is seafood, it gets eaten outside, and people drift in and out of it all afternoon.
Getting the seafood is half the occasion. In the days before Christmas, the Sydney Fish Market at Blackwattle Bay turns into something closer to a festival, with queues running out of the building and the whole city buying prawns, oysters and whole fish at once. Regulars know to plan around the crowds, and many bring an esky, the insulated cool box that lives in most Australian households for exactly this reason.
Then it is somebody’s backyard for the rest of the day. The prawns get peeled at the table while the rest goes on the barbecue, and since mangoes and cherries are at their best in December, dessert more or less sorts itself out.
The Boxing Day Yacht Race
It is not what it sounds like. Boxing Day normally sounds like it should involve gloves and a ring. Well, you are not entirely wrong about the competition, though the contenders here are boats.
Boxing Day falls on 26 December and is a public holiday across Australia. It began as a day of giving, when servants, tradespeople and the poor were handed gifts the day after Christmas, though where exactly the name came from is still argued over. These days it belongs to celebrations and sports, with a yacht race at the centre.
Alt: Spectators on a harbour headland watching yachts sail past
At 1 pm, the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race leaves the harbour and heads south for Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, which is open ocean the whole way. The Boxing Day yacht race runs every year, and the televised start pulls in most of the country.
You don’t need a ticket to watch the start from shore, but your viewpoint matters. The foreshore fills from the morning, and anywhere with a clear view of the water works. Arrive early and bring folding chairs to watch the fleet gather before the start, then head out towards the open sea.
New Year’s Eve Fireworks
Sydney’s New Year’s Eve fireworks are among the first major celebrations of the new year watched around the world.
Fireworks won’t be new to you. You grew up with Diwali. What’s different here is the scale of the shared spectacle: the harbour becomes the centre of the celebration, with crowds gathered along the foreshore and boats watching from the water as fireworks light up the night.
Two displays, one at nine o’clock and one at midnight. Boats strung with lights cross the harbour in between. The foreshore turns into one long picnic with strangers sharing a rug, and everyone waits for midnight. Finding a spot is the hard part. The City lists dozens of free vantage points around the harbour, and on a night this crowded the good ones are gone by afternoon. Get there early.
Every one of these happens outdoors and in company. The park, the harbour, the foreshore, somebody’s backyard full of people you only half know. That is how December works here, and it is also how a newcomer stops being one. You turn up, and by the end of the night you are part of the crowd rather than someone watching it.
