Christmas Day will start early at Sydney’s Wayside Chapel. From about 6am volunteers will be blocking off the street and “rolling out the green carpet”.
“We’re going to cover Hughes Street in astroturf and lay down some picnic blankets, appropriately socially distanced spots reserved for our very important guests,” the Kings Cross charity’s chief executive, Pastor Jon Owen, says, adding: “many of whom will be waking up in the gutter that morning.”
The Wayside Chapel is among many Australian organisations that will open its doors to those with nowhere else to go on Christmas Day, offering a sense of something that has been particularly hard to grasp over the past two years: togetherness.
Other organisations will hold their massive Christmas lunches as takeaway affairs, albeit still with plenty of colour and movement, but Owen is delighted this year’s street party (or picnic) can go ahead. Last year’s event was cancelled due to Sydney’s Northern Beaches outbreak.
“We’ve been told by our governments to go and have a family Christmas,” he says. “This is family Christmas for so many people who are going to wake up with no one else in their lives except us.”
But there are still Covid considerations. Despite the many volunteers in isolation, Owen says there are plenty of eager helpers on the “reserves bench” – who will be fully vaccinated and wearing PPE.
Covid marshals will be in place as the day rolls through the Christmas chapel service with a street choir, Santa’s visit, and into a lunch “with all the trimmings”.
Owen insists that the event is more important than ever. “The common refrain is, ‘I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been able to come here today’,” he says. “That’s not said in a flippant way. They look me in the eyes with a sense of depth and clarity. It gives you pause in the midst of all the chaos.”
Across Sydney in Ashfield, the Rev Bill Crews will be spending his 50th Christmas Day with the poor and disadvantaged.
His foundation’s Christmas lunch will be takeaway – but they’re expecting to pump out as many as 3,000 meals across the day.
“People are crying out for community now, we’ve been so isolated,” says Crews. “You see a crowd and you kind of get a bit nervous. There’s going to be this need in all of us to get together.”
Wayside Chapel’s message is all about love, and Crews expresses a similar sentiment when talking about the importance of his foundation’s Christmas lunch.
The last census found there were 16,427 people across the country without a safe, secure place to sleep at night and Owen notes with distress recent food bank research noting many Australians are experiencing food insecurity.
This reality only becomes more stark at Christmas. The Salvation Army said in a report released in 2018 that about 15.5% of Australian adults were likely to contact a charity for help with basic necessities such as food, power or other bills at Christmas.
“This is a challenging time of the year for people,” says Chris Middendorp, the manager of client services at Sacred Heart Central in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda.
The Sacred Heart Mission Christmas lunch has been running about 40 years, says Middendorp and, like Crews’ operation in Sydney, it will be takeaway again this year.
The charity is expecting to serve about 400 lunches of roast, or mushroom wellington for vegetarians, and Christmas pudding.
Most who will come for lunch will be experiencing homelessness or struggling financially and are local to the area, which is known for its stark economic divide between the wealthy and disadvantaged.
They’ll take their Christmas lunches to the park next door to dine together, or back to rooming houses, or nearby public housing, Middendorp says.
“It’s not just about the food of course,” says Middendorp. “A lot of the people we work with are experiencing disadvantage. They don’t have as positive an experience of the community as the rest of us. It’s good to have a place of non-judgment.”
Crews has a similar message: “Many come here feeling left out, isolated, not cared for by society. I hope they leave here feeling, ‘I am part of society and I am loved for who I am, just as I am.’”
Owen uses a broader term when asks who’ll be coming around for Christmas lunch. It applies to the volunteers, as well as those being served lunch.
“We invite everyone to come and celebrate with us who has a hole in their heart,” he says. “I’ve got a whole bunch of volunteers who over the past few years have lost children, and they say, ‘I cannot bear the thought of sitting at home staring at an empty chair at our Christmas table, with a hole in my heart.’
“[They say,] ‘I’d rather take that love that’s been robbed from me and give it to people who desperately need it.’”
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