A Christmas message from Mike Bowers.
Mon 22 Dec 2025 06.00
Image: Supplied
My late father loved Christmas and I inherited that from him.
He had many rituals and his eccentric nature burst into full bloom in December.
My own Christmas ritual involves the placement of too many lights on our house. Dad’s peaked with a piece of absurdist theatre that was the cooking of the Christmas turkey, in three acts.
I have always remembered him fondly at this time of year, there would, however, be no José Feliciano singing Feliz Navidad in 2025, and I feared it would never be the same again.
More of that later, let me explain.
A shadow hung over me and my sister. You see my dad’s last wish remained unrealised, and, as Christmas approached this year, it has brought that into sharp focus.
But let’s rewind a few years and let me paint a Christmas picture for you.
The curtain goes up. The Christmas Turkey: Act One – the purchase of the Turkey.
It had to be the biggest one possible, so big one year it didn’t fit into the oven and had to be cut in two. So big it would take forever to cook, so big it would last well into the new year. You get the picture.
Marinating began in the days before Christmas, the ingredients were many and I’m afraid the recipe is lost to us.
Act Two is the impossibly complex cooking which usually began before dawn on the 25th. I have forgotten a lot of details, I just know it involved commercial quantities of bacon and pineapple and an hourly basting ritual involving orange juice and brandy.
The whole process was interpretive dance, carefully choregraphed and honed to perfection over many years. The cooking would take many hours, my sister and I would lubricate the day with alcohol, a coping mechanism, I guess.
By the time the cooking was complete my sister and I would be fairly baked ourselves.
The climax and final act was the carving, performed at the table. A table only used for “special occasions” using cutlery and crockery utilised once a year and known as “the good set”. Dad had a special knife reserved only for Christmas Turkey carving.
The results never quite lived up to expectations but that was never really the point. It was pure theatre that signaled Christmas in our family. To this day I can’t look at a turkey without thinking of dad. I often muse that the pardoning of the turkeys by the President of the United States would not have saved them in our house.
To be completely honest it’s kind of put me off turkey, I can’t face it.
Image: Supplied
Peter James Bowers was the last of five children. Born in 1930, his father was the teacher in a single room school between military service in both world wars. The school had the unlikely name of “The Risk” and was nestled at the foot of the McPherson Ranges near the Queensland border in Northern NSW.
In the still of early morning, fog snakes its way along the valleys that lead from the ranges, a pretty and idyllic setting for a weatherboard country school.
He once wrote lovingly about his childhood at The Risk:
“I grew up walking barefoot, riding bareback and swimming bare-bummed in Grady’s creek”
His time there was printed in his DNA and became a large part of his identity. It would materialise onto the page many times in his long career in journalism.
So not surprisingly It was my dad’s final wish before Alzheimer’s turned him to a husk to have his ashes poured into that creek where he once swung off a rope tied to a large eucalyptus, his final swim.
Dad died in 2010 and although I tried to fulfil his wish my mother resisted every effort.
She kept his ashes on her bedside table, they seemed a comfort during the 15 years she outlived him. The last place I can remember the ash container was on that table in its blue velvet cover.
This unfulfilled request has been a stone in my heart for many years. An uneasy guilt that would flare to an ache at this time of year.
Finally, in November 2025, my sister and I planned to drive up to The Risk to remove the stone. The journey to dad’s idyllic childhood home would take a few days out of our busy schedules. I had planned to read some of his words about The Risk while Mandie poured out the ashes. We set aside some dates and my sister went looking for the container.
It was only then we discovered to our horror that dad was lost to us-again.
We lost mum in March 2024 and had sold her flat earlier this year. My sister had searched all of the remaining contents of house, and the ashes were nowhere to be found.
Questions were posed and fingers were pointed, we had somehow thrown out dad with the many loads of their lives we couldn’t re-home.
It was terribly empty feeling, one I thought would ruin Christmas forever. Turkeys and carvings were am an annual reminder.
Oh my god we had sent dad to the dump. A part of that sentence I thought would appeal to his complex and eccentric nature, but it was a horrible feeling of empty despair that I had failed in my last duty as a son.
I could hear his voice in my head:
“My kids sent me to the dump – GREAT”.
He had a rapier sense of sarcasm.
José Feliciano, a vinyl favourite of his at this time of year, would have to be banned. For months I would suddenly remember our failure. “Oh how could we have done this?”
Just as the festive guilt was reaching its peak, relief arrived from my sister Mandie in the form of a text message. It was a simple “Guess what?”
I knew instantly and relief coursed through me. “Thank God,” I sent back.
She sent me a picture of the velvet covered container.
We should have known from the start, he had been stored in a most appropriate place.
My dad was tucked into the box containing all the Christmas decorations and dress up onesies, a fitting place for him to rest while his unorganised offspring got their act together.
The annual act of pulling out the festive decorations revealing his whereabouts. Dad would approve. “Oh so I’m not at the dump? – GREAT”.
Hooray, I was very thankful – Christmas is saved.
We will travel to the risk in the new year and finally dispense with my heart stone
This has been a frightful end to the year in so many ways.
So, I guess my Christmas message to you all is to hug the family you have, hold them close and treasure your Christmas rituals.
They are fleeting, remember fondly the ones that have left us and Merry Christmas to you all from me and my family.
Cue José, trumpets and classic guitar.
However, turkey is still off the family menu.
Feliz Navidad all.
Mike Bowers is photographer-at-large for The New Daily and the host of Talking Pictures on the ABC’s Insiders program.
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