In 2006, Australian photographer Trent Parke moved in with his in-laws in suburban Adelaide for Christmas. He and his wife, Narelle, were in between houses and had two young children. Parke kept himself relatively sane by photographing some of the insanity of a 40-degree festive season in which sweaty barbecues and screaming toddlers loomed large. He only started to think of his pictures as a proper festive series, however, when he was overcome with a sickness bug, which caused him to reach for the nearest thing at hand in which to retch. His mother-in-law, disturbed to find him bent double out on the front lawn, called in alarm to her husband: “Oh, Laurie! Trent’s vomiting into the Christmas tree bucket.”
That nausea seemed to set the tone for the yuletide that followed, in which the TV guide was all four gospels and the sun beat down on conjured winter wonderlands. Parke’s father-in-law appears at one point dressed as a full-size hot dog. The series demands a Tom Lehrer soundtrack: “Kill the turkeys, ducks, and chickens/Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens/Even though the prospect sickens/Brother, here we go again!” Resistance, as any faint-hearted Christmas fairy knows, is always futile.
The dancing Santa emerging from his chimney-like cardboard box is one of Parke’s more whimsical images (elsewhere, a Santa piñata hangs decapitated on the porch). Parke’s habit of shooting at carpet-level captures both the child’s eye surreality of life below the tinsel line and that creeping sense of dread beloved by Grinches across the world, who are counting the days to point out how this particular Old St Nick, pre-programmed with his surprising twerks and a lifetime of “ho, ho, hos”, has no doubt arrived boxed up among thousands of bearded clones on a container ship from China.
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