The contrast between the European imagery of Christmas and its Australian reality has struck all immigrants since settlement. Christmas carols sing of cold starry nights and snow.
The re-creation of an English Christmas dinner with its hot turkey, roast potatoes and steamed pudding in 40 degree heat, preceded by an appearance of a sweat-drenched Father Christmas, has continued to try the endurance of cooks and the temper of families.
This year the contrast between the original story of Christmas and its Australian circumstances has cut even deeper.
Bushfires have taken lives, destroyed properties and spread smoke and ash over cities. Even holiday-makers who leave the city for the seaside and the country will cautiously study the weather forecasts and listen for fire alerts.
If the theme of the first Christmas was one of hope and joy, behind the bushfires this year lurks anxiety about the future of Australia, and indeed of the world. Are the high temperature, drought and destructive fires of this Christmas a preparation for a man-made world to come of merciless sunshine and burning?
The conjunction of Christmas with fear and loss, however, is not foreign but is part of the Christmas story. The bushfires that lap at Christmas this year remind us of one of the loveliest of the English Christmas poems, 'The Burning Babe'.
Jesuit Robert Southwell wrote it at a time when his own horizon was bounded by the likelihood of torture and execution — he was tortured, hung, drawn and quartered in 1595. His poem encompasses not only Jesus' birth, but the rejection, torture and death that brought salvation.
Given the circumstances of its composition, the poem is understandably unrelenting in turning away from easy sentiment. It begins with the narrator shivering.
A sudden heat he experiences warms him but makes him anxious about its cause. The burning infant whose apparition is responsible for the rise in temperature is scorched by the heat and weeps uncontrollably:
As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris'd I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
Southwell goes on to describe Jesus as a furnace, in which humanity is refined by his sufferings and death. In the image of the burning babe he finds space for all the details of the story of the salvation won by Christ.
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defiled souls ...
Southwell's vision, of course, extends beyond Jesus' birth to the death that brought salvation to the human race.
That was the focus, too, of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, in which the stories of Jesus' childhood are a prelude.
Jesus' path through death to rising is anticipated in Herod's attempt to have him killed and in the sword which Simeon predicts will pierce Mary's heart.
The pain and conflict inherent in these details of the Christmas stories challenge any attempt to sentimentalise them. They are more than a celebration of family and of the gift of a new life.
If the stories are domestic in their focus, it is because domestic situations are inherently precarious. Birth is never far from death; the peace and comforts of home are never safely distant from the terrors of violence, illness, unemployment and fire.
The Gospel stories, including those of Christmas, test any easy faith, any easy hope, by confronting them with the loss of all that we treasure.
To believe in a loving and caring God must reckon with a God who allows a chosen one to be born in a stable and be a hairbreadth away from slaughter by Herod's soldiers.
To trust in a God who promises a more just world must reckon with the knowledge that God allows that chosen one to be cut to pieces by the forces of injustice.
These challenges to faith and trust can be met only by a deeper trust in a God whose love is to be found in a death. To embroider Southwell's confronting image, radical trust invites us to hug the burning babe.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.