How to Make Gravy Day

Paul Kelly: Carrying the baggage of a nation.

Until last week I didn’t know “How to Make Gravy” was a “thing”. It turns out it’s “our favourite national holiday”, “an intrinsic part of Australian Christmas”. Australia marks December 21 as “How to Make Gravy Day”, and has been doing so (or so it’s been claimed) for 25 years. The date is mentioned in the opening lines of Paul Kelly’s 1996 song How to Make Gravy, which was also the title of his 2010 book, a memoir in which Kelly takes the lyrics of 100 of his songs as starting points to tell the stories of his life. My friend Peter Crossing, now in Adelaide, brought all this to my attention when six days ago he opened his 11-year-old Christmas gift copy of the book and found inside a clipping of my review of it (originally typeritten), published in The Canberra Times on October 2, 2010.

The single How to Make Gravy is these days considered “The iconic Aussie Christmas song”, “the quintessential Australian Christmas anthem”. The songs we grew up with talked of a "White Christmas", and were tunes to go with cards emblazoned with snow - never very appropriate at the height of our summers, even with La Niña. How to Make Gravy tells of Joe, an imprisoned man, writing a letter to his brother Dan, lamenting that he will be missing the family's Christmas celebrations and not being there to make the gravy to go with the roast. During the pandemic, the song has taken on a new meaning for families and friends separated by border closures. This year’s music video of the song featured clips of people around the world telling their loved ones they miss them. The Sydney Morning Herald said, “For the uninitiated, the soundtrack to the silly season might mean Mariah Carey warbling that ‘all she wants for Christmas is you’ but for those in the know, for those who understand the true meaning of the holiday, there is only one song that matters.”

As much as I enjoy listening to Kelly’s songs, I feel an added affinity because his backing group from 1989-91 was called The Messengers. Kelly, who turns 67 next month, grew up in Adelaide, settled in Melbourne in 1976, moved to Sydney in 1985 and returned to Melbourne in 1991.

Perhaps unwittingly for the singer-songwriter, Kelly’s How to Make Gravy seems to have taken on a life of its own, almost separate from his hugely impressive overall body of work. In that it reminds me of The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York,  featuring Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl on vocals. Although this single has never been the British Christmas No 1, it has reached the British Top 20 on 18 separate occasions since 1987, including every year at Christmas since 2005. It’s the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century and is frequently cited as the best Christmas song of all time in various television, radio and magazine-related polls in Britain. Helen Brown of the London Daily Telegraph wrote of it, “In careening wildly through a gamut of moods from maudlin to euphoric, sentimental to profane, mud-slinging to sincerely devoted in the space of four glorious minutes, it's seemed perfectly suited to Christmas, a time which highlights the disparity between the haves and have nots around the world. Those of us lucky enough to spend the day with friends and families by a cosy fire with a full stomach think of the lonely, the homeless and the hungry.” It has, in other words, echoes of How to Make Gravy.