The Bourdamis family’s first “summer” holidays in Australia, as remembered and retold by t
Source: NEOS KOSMOS
Suzy (Aspasia) Bourdamis’s mother, Evangelia, still remembers how strange it felt that her first Christmas and New Year’s in Australia was… warm. She and her husband, Yiannis Bourdamis, arrived in the country in 1961 and settled in Deniliquin, a small rural town where summers were long and scorching, nothing like the winter holidays they had known back in Greece.
And yet, despite the heat, Christmas somehow felt cold. Not because of the temperature, but because something essential was missing.
The glow of Athens at Christmas time, the decorated streets, the shop windows, the sense of a city transformed for the festive season.
The women of the local Greek circle did what they could to keep tradition alive. They cooked Christmas dishes, baked sweets, and prepared the New Year’s vasilopita. It was their way of filling the emptiness, of easing the longing for a distant homeland and for loved ones who felt even further away during the holidays.
Back then, life in exile cut deep, especially in small regional towns with no Greek church and no organised community. For many, that was the hardest part: waking up on Christmas Day without the Divine Liturgy, without the familiar ritual of new clothes and the first greeting exchanged inside the church.
Christmas at Lake Boga. Little Aspasia with her parents, Evangelia and Yiannis Bourdamis, and her brother Grigoris. “By a lake, but dressed in our festive clothes, just as tradition demands,” Aspasia says of the photo.
It was for this reason that, in 1970, Yiannis and Evangelia decided to move to Geelong, after spending a few years in Swan Hill. They had heard there was a Greek presence there with a church, a community, a sense of collective life that had been missing so profoundly.
As the family grew, Australian elements gradually made their way onto the Christmas table: prawns, pavlova, and Christmas crackers that delighted the children with their jokes and riddles. Traditions evolved, but the thread tying them to Greece was never broken.
One cherished family ritual involved opening an old suitcase filled with black-and-white photographs. For years, Aspasia has thought about putting them into albums, but she always decides that the magic lies precisely in that worn, battered suitcase. Now the grandchildren take part too, searching through images and stories passed down like a prayer.
The same is true of the Bourdamis family vasilopita: a tradition kept exactly the same every New Year’s Day. The grandfather puts $100 in for the coin.
The anticipation is intense, and when the lucky winner is revealed, the house fills with laughter and celebration.
Today, with a family full of grandchildren and new lives, Aspasia’s parents feel complete. They often say they were blessed to have come to a country like Australia; that they thank God every day for the path their lives took and that, in the end, it doesn’t matter whether Christmas is snowy or summery.
What matters is the love that fills the home.
The original article: belongs to NEOS KOSMOS .
