Christmas in Tropical Heat

I will soon experience my 9th Christmas in South Africa and will try to give you some ideas about how it is.

My definition of the important attributes for a Swedish Christmas:

• Snow, cold and darkness except for all the candlelights
• The smell och the Christmas tree and the acrid smell of burning "tomtebloss"
• Disney's Christmas program on TV
• The owen-roasted ham and "dopp-i-grytan" with M:s potato sallad
• "Inlagd sill" and "flätbröd"
• Pickled ox tongue

I have here just two of the items: darkness (at least after 8pm) and the pickled tongue. I could of course bake the "flätbröd" if I had the recipe... All the rest is impossible to get here!
The ham is available as Gammon, but then it is smoked, probably as a heritage from the English and Dutch sailing around the Cape, as the smoked ham keeps longer than just the cured ham.
The spruce we used for a Christmas tree is simply nowhere to be found.
My first Christmas here, in 2000, I made a turkey. But not in the oven, but on a charcoal Weber. Quite an adventure, but it was successful.
Another big difference is that Christmas here is just 25 December.

I'm not sure what we will have for Christmas this year... Perhaps just salads and cold meat like smoked ham, salami and pastrami. The heavy swedish Christmas food, like roasted porkbelly and rice porridge is simply not the right food to have when it's 30-35 degrees warm!

We will most certainly have some nice home baked bread. I bake a lot of bread here. If I get the recipe we might have "flätbröd"!

In summary: it is quite difficult to have the traditional Swedish Christmas feeling...
I will post some pictures during or after Christmas.