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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 5, Issue 8 (February 1, 1931)

Holiday Time — The Christmastide Out of Doors Some Memories

page 35

Holiday Time
The Christmastide Out of Doors Some Memories

“When it's Springtime in the Rockies I'm coming back to you.”

So runs a popular and pretty gramophone song of the day. Here in New Zealand, where midsummer and holiday-time so happily coincide, it is the approach of Christmas that brings joyful anticipations of a return to the old home, to reunions with old friends, and to days of release from toil, days above all spent in the open air. Perhaps New Zealanders do not sufficiently realise how fortunate they are to be able to enjoy their great holiday of the year under climatic conditions so different from those of the land from which their fathers came.

The glory of the out-of-doors, the joy of the road, the bush, the mountains and the water, are theirs in the season when they have most leisure. Even if that leisure time be spent chiefly in travelling rather than in a quiet rest in some easily reached country nook, or some old familiar haunt, there is the change of scene, the change of company, the interest in making new friends, that have their part in physical and mental recuperation.

To everyone his holiday taste, to everyone his spot beloved over all other places, his restorative for jaded body and jangled nerves. Some will travel the length of the Dominion to meet old friends; scattered families are together again for a few too-brief days or hours. There are some whose holiday wants are easily satisfied. I know a veteran editorial toiler on a city newspaper whose idea of supreme holiday bliss is to get into his oldest clothes, get his fishing tackle and his tin of smellful bait, and dream the hours away in the stern of his small boat anchored out in the bay. Pipe in mouth, hat slouched over one eye, line in hand, he sits there in utter content, and lets old Time go by. If the fish like to come and hook themselves on, well and good, if not, he has no complaint. Those days in the boat prolong his life; he needs no medicine but his week-end rest cure, lengthened to a perfectly delightful fortnight at Christmastime.

There are others, the young folk—lucky, lucky youngsters, to be just youngsters!—whose delight is the merry bustle of quick-change travel, and who can play all day and dance all night, the more crowded the holiday place the better. Everyone to his taste—and hers. And a glory of our land is that there is so much that is new for those lucky youthful ones—something new always round the turn of the road.

Call of the North.

In these fleeting reflections on Christmases past, present and to come, the inclination naturally is to let memory stray back along the old trails, the old waterways, and to wonder whether anything the coming days hold for one is likely to be as sweet as those that are far, too far, behind. My own most cherished memories are of the North. Long days spent in the saddle, boating cruises, nights in camp under the trees, or gently rocked to slumber in some sweet old anchorage, some delightful bay of the thousand bays along the Auckland coast.

In those youthful days, when Christmastime brought the long spell of the year, there was always that element of surprise, obtained in a more simple way than it is to-day.

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In Picnic Bay.

What mingled pleasure and regret there is in the thought of old Hauraki days! In one craft and another, but most of all in a certain little half-decker, we sailed from bay to bay, making a new anchorage every night. We poked into all sorts of coves and creeks along that most enchanting sector of the Auckland coast; we cooked our meals on an old nail-can, which made the best possible stove; we found every day a new adventure.

One Christmas Day it happened that our rendezvous was Coromandel. We made up a party that day, with some friends from the shore, and what a party it was, and how we pitied the folk in the towns that day of perfect delight! We sailed across the harbour to that enchanting spot, the “Little Passage,” where the long woody point of the northern shore comes out to meet Beeson's Island. Mainland and island almost touch noses there is a narrow seaway between rimmed by the cleanest and whitest of sandy beaches. What a Christmas dinner it was! There was schnapper fresh caught from the little passage; we boiled it in salt water with the potatoes; there were lots of good things from the shore, including a glorious duff; and there were oysters from the rocks—the most delicious oysters I had ever tasted, and we had sampled them from every island in the Gulf in those happy days before absurd poaching regulations were invented along the Hauraki.

We picnicked under a grand old spreading pohutukawa tree, aflame with blossoms. Close by, a spring of fresh water bubbled up in the grass, and ran its few yards through the sands to the sea. It was a perfect camping place, and a perfectly joyous Christmas Day it was. A meal eaten amidst the loveliest of scenes, a gentle breeze that came as a caress; warmth and sunshine, and the low wash of the blue water; peace like a benediction over land and sea.

One hopes for more such halcyon days, knowing full well all the same that this old zest of life can never be recaptured.

Our Christmas Tree.

Mention of the pohutukawa — for Christmastime and our New Zealand Christmas-tree are inseparably associated, at any rate in the North—inevitably brings up mind-pictures of that glorious tree on cliff and beachside for a thousand miles of coast. What a sight it is in flower these Christmas weeks, emblazoning all that rocky coast, bending over every sandy beach, burning with colour, at once the delight and the despair of the artist.

It seems to have its cycles of intense bloom. Every third year there is a more profuse showering of its deep-red blossom; a more bountiful meal of nectar for the honey-sucking birds.

Camp Life.

That genial old gossiper, Dr. Henry Van Dyke, has something to say in his book “Fisherman's Luck,” about holiday life in the open that I cannot resist quoting, since it perfectly expresses a fact that we New Zealanders, who love the camp life, can vividly appreciate. “The people who always live in houses,” he writes, “and sleep on beds, and walklon pavements, and buy their food from butchers and bakers and grocers, are not the most blessed inhabitants of this wide and various earth. The circumstances are too mathematical and secure for perfect contentment. They live at second or third hand. They are boarders in the world. Everything is done for them by somebody else…. What do these tame ducks really know of the adventure of living? They might as well be brought up in an incubator. But when man abides in tents, after the manner of the early patriarchs, the face of the world is renewed. The vagaries of the clouds become significant. You watch the sky with a lover's look, eager to know whether it will smile or frown. When you lie at night upon your bed of boughs and hear the rain pattering on the canvas close above your head; you wonder whether it is a storm or only a shower.”

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That sort of experience, now and then, is good for most people. As Van Dyke says, it brings us home to the plain realities of life.

On the River.

A Christmas-season memory of one's own, from many memories, this clinches —if such clinching were needed—the good old angler's philosophy.

“‘Tis such a scene of bright p spective and brave hues As no painter can forge, brushing his greys and blues.”—Robert Bridges (Govt. Publicity photo.) In Half Moon Bay (near Oban) Stewart Island, New Zealand.

“‘Tis such a scene of bright p spective and brave hues As no painter can forge, brushing his greys and blues.”—Robert Bridges
(Govt. Publicity photo.)
In Half Moon Bay (near Oban) Stewart Island, New Zealand.

We were canoeing and camping up the Mokau River, up above the limits of steamboat navigation. One evening, after a particularly strenuous day paddling and poling and rapid-climbing, we ate our supper of fried bacon and “hard tack” at a fire we had made on a snagstrewn little island in the river, at the Panirau bend, where forested ranges rose steeply for nearly a thousand feet above us. Wearily we turned in, and listened to the voices of the night. Rapids rumbled and growled above and below our island; we heard the kiwi's call and the high melancholy crake of the weka. Heard, too, the song of the mosquito, and felt its accompaniment, but not for long; even that could not keep tired canoemen awake. And morning on Panirau—how glorious a sight! We turned out refreshed for another day's adventure. This canoe voyage of ours had all the charm of an exploring expedition. Something new lay round every bend in the winding Mokau. As we opened up a long smooth reach above the rapids, the lights and shadows and tender tints of early morning were beautiful beyond imagining. A shimmer of mist lay along the river; fog banks belted the upper parts of the hills. Then up over the lofty Ranga-a-Waitara range swung the glorious sun, and cliff and forest and river were all suffused with the softest rosy light. The mist veil melted away, the white forms of the Haumaringirngi, the foggy phantoms, floated away, and into the deeper hollows of the hills, the mountain tops lifted clear in the pearly morning light.

How could one but rejoice and be strong on such a morning, when all the world was good!

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This Land of Ours.

One could go on recalling one such midsummer memory after another. There were days and nights far down the West Coast, in the glacier country; there was a quiet and enchanting week at stewart Island, by bush track and whale-boat. The cumulative effect of the retrospect is a sense of gladness at having seen so much, experienced so much of the real New Zealand, a gratitude to “whatever gods there be” that one was able to extract so much of the joy of life from this pleasant land of ours while there was yet time. For inevitably there comes a time when bones ache and joints creak, when one wants to take it easy in holiday-time. Tents leak, the fire smokes, the bacon is burned; you can't see the mountains for the wet fog; you might as well be home in comfort.

But the joy of the road, the call of the open air, is overwhelmingly strong when the sun shines and the wind softly blows across the plain, and there is the knowledge that office and shop and factory
“The glassy river sparkled smooth as jet, Just touched with crystal beams.”—Robert Buchannan. The beautiful headwaters of the Whakatane, North Island, New Zealand.

“The glassy river sparkled smooth as jet, Just touched with crystal beams.”—Robert Buchannan.
The beautiful headwaters of the Whakatane, North Island, New Zealand.

and school can do without us for a while. And with our modern travel methods, it is easy enough and cheap enough to tour the length and breadth of the land and seek out the place of rest and solace that suits us best. For as always, whether it is a lively and crowded holiday house or a lonely camp in bush or bay, everyone to his own taste.

Station Gardens Competition.

Much interest is now being evoked in the coming competition for the best kept station garden in the Canterbury district. Working in conjunction with the Canterbury Horticultural Society, the members of the Traffic Manager's staff throughout Canterbury have the competition well under way. There will be two divisions in this competition—A and B—and some splendid trophies have been donated for each division. This year there appears to be a much fuller appreciation of the value of such a competition, and the task of judging the winning gardens promises to be both interesting and difficult.