At 27 years old, Lindsay Dawson felt she was just where she needed to be in terms of her career trajectory, and was quite content with the way her future was mapping out. Following a charity trek along the Great Wall of China, however, life’s potential began to look a little different.
‘After the trek I spent a week in Sydney,’ she explains. ‘I called my mum and said, “this feels like a home from home.” I went back to London, and six months later resigned and off I went. I bought myself a 1976 VW Combi to travel around Australia - which was very hard to drive, especially through central Australia with all the kangaroos and the road trains, and no air con.’
Seeking work, Lyndsay settled in Sydney, her chosen home from home.
Brett at this time worked for the advertising agency that had Vodafone as a key client.
‘We just kept bumping into each other,’ he says, ‘we knew each other for a while and it wasn’t till much later we got together. By that time I had left and set up my own agency, Lyndsay had been made redundant and had retrained as a yoga teacher.
Brett and Lindsay bought their dream home in Sydney, in the Northern Beaches, travelled the globe and lived their best Australian life, with the cherry on the cake being the arrival (terrifyingly early, at 27 weeks and weighing just 900g (1.98lb)) of their son, Louie. In 2019 Brett sold his agency to M&C Saatchi and in 2021 the family decided the time was right to move to the UK.
‘I had to remain with the agency until 2021 and then was on a no compete clause until 2022. Louie hadn’t yet started school, I couldn’t work, so we rented out our Sydney beach house and came here, to be closer to Lindsay’s family, who live on the Wirral and in Chester.’
The family now live in a converted barn in Poulton.
‘In April 2022 we were walking our dog, Snoop (who came from Sydney with his family), and we’d walked around here a lot, but we’d never found Poulton, this sleepy little village, a hidden gem. We were just walking and saw a For Sale sign. It was an ex-Grosvenor barn (which Lyndsay had to explain to me) and had been on the market just two weeks. We bought it within the week,’ Brett says.
The barn had previously been lived in, but was converted for domestic use in 1983, so Brett and Lyndsay have very much put their own stamp on it.
Now, of course, the family that started life in the heat of Australia are spending their Christmases in the chill of Cheshire, blending British and Australian traditions to create their very own, unique Dawson family Christmas.
‘In Australia, Christmas still is all about family and relaxing – it’s about as much water and swimming as you can get and about as much seafood as you can eat. Prawns and cold honey-baked ham, roasted the night before. Loads of fresh side salads and fruit, and six or seven swims a day. Boxing Day it all changes gear and the entire nation just focusses on the cricket, the five-day Test against another national side. In our house, it was swim-cricket-swim-cricket-eat, and repeat. The sun sets late, so it’s cold salads, meat and seafood through the day and then in the evening you’d fire up the barbecue and eat outside. I wouldn’t wear shoes from Christmas Eve till New Year’s Day, just a brilliant week of friends and family and prawns and cricket and swimming.
Linsday, coming from a nation where Christmas is our biggest family occasion of the year, wasn’t hugely enamoured of the more laid-back Australian approach.
‘When we got married, we invited my whole extended family to us for our first Christmas,’ Brett says. ‘We had a 12-seater table and Lyndsay fully dressed it, as she does here, and my family were completely bemused. Nobody wanted to sit at the table, it looked too good to disturb it. And where was I supposed to carve the ham?’
‘That was the one big influence she had over Christmas,’ Brett says, ‘and pigs in blankets. Lyndsay introduced pigs in blankets and everybody loved them. Growing up, Christmas Eve was a frenzy of fresh seafood, we’d go to the local fishmonger, and you could queue for two hours, and get fish, kilos of prawns, calamari, oysters, salmon...’
The family moved to England when Louie was four, and for him that meant many firsts – his first Nativity play, his first Christmas jumper, his first experience of snow and his first snowman, built with his dad just before his first midwinter Christmas.
‘I dress the table the night before, as we did growing up. I have decorated throughout the house, including the huge tree in the kitchen, which we went to choose ourselves, and I went to a neighbour’s for a wreath-making party. I bring Australia into our Christmas by using eucalyptus leaves in the table décor, and found wrapping paper decorated with eucalyptus leaves, too. I stick to a green, gold and silver colour palette all throughout. I do it all myself, and I love it.
‘We drive Louie around the neighbourhood to see all the Christmas lights, and I serve Granny’s trifle, an absolute family classic. Brett had never had trifle before,’ she shakes her head. ‘And he’s been on a voyage of discovery with British chocolate, too. In Australia they add anti-melting agents to all chocolate, so it tastes quite different. We eat a lot more chocolate now, including what was Brett’s first yule log.’
Brett is the chef at Christmas, and while he still brings a roast ham to the table, he hasn’t bought into the British obsession with turkey.
‘I don’t like it,’ he says. ‘So I did some research and learned about roast cockerel as an alternative. I found a poultry farm where you can pre-order a cockerel, and they’re really good. We have goose fat roast potatoes - which was actually something else Lindsay introduced to us in Australia – red cabbage with raisins and walnuts, and parmesan roasted Brussels sprouts. I do a poached pear tart for pudding, with ice-cream.’
Christmas in Australia and England couldn’t be more different, yet Lindsay and Brett have brought the best of both together to create the perfect Christmas at their beautiful Poulton home.
