[Editor: This article, regarding Christmas, was published in the “Stray notes” section in The Week (Brisbane, Qld.), 17 December 1887.]
Christmas cold.
On Sunday next, all being well, our faithful Fahrenheit may be expected to register 120 degrees in the sun on the coolest hill in Brisbane. Everybody tells everybody, therefore it must be true, what a wonderful season we are having; it is so cool, so balmy, so glorious; like the climate of Italy or Paradise.
It goes without saying it, that the same temperature will not prevail everywhere. The hotter it is for us, the colder it is for some other people, there are no two ways about that. Sol himself has only an absolute quantity of heat, and if that is all poured out on Australia and India on December 25, there is none for Europe and America.
But just to make the teeth of little Australian boys chatter at the thought of it, they should know that just before some of them were born, that is 27 years ago, the cold in London was the coldest cold ever recorded there. At 9 o’clock on Christmas day morning, 1860, the thermometer — heat measurer that means — registered 15 degrees Fahrenheit; that is, 17 degrees below freezing point. It must have been a coldish joke to call that Fahrenheit instrument a “heat measurer.” But the morning was mild compared with the previous night in many parts of the country; a fine prospect for the ardent youths who were expecting and praying for a keyhole frost.
There must have been something terribly wrong about that Gulf Stream which helps to keep England from perishing with cold in the winter time. Probably it was that other stream which comes down from the north, bringing so much cold with it, that got the better of the Gulf Stream. That terrible cold produced what are called some hard frosts. But in 1848-9 the mercury itself froze in the glass tube in some places in Sweden. It was nearly cold enough to put a fire out, and made it difficult for persons well disposed to it to tell the truth. How would you like that, my bhoys?
Australia for ever! May Christmas day never be shorter, never cease to come.
Source:
The Week (Brisbane, Qld.), 17 December 1887, p. 15
Also published in:
The Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld.), 24 December 1887, p. 2
Editor’s notes:
bhoy = (Irish vernacular) boy
Sol = the Sun; in Roman mythology, Sol was god of the Sun; in Norse mythology, Sól was goddess of the Sun
[Editor: The original text has been separated into paragraphs.]
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