iphone, Observation, Wild Horses

Ten Christmas Facts for the Festive Season.

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Daily Photo – The Festive Season

Ten Christmas facts for the festive season.
Here are ten Christmas facts with a bit of quirk and character that you might not have read in your Christmas cracker this year.

1. Christmas was once banned. In 17th-century England, Christmas was outlawed by the Puritans, who felt too much feasting, singing, and general merriment was suspiciously unholy.

2. Santa has a postcode. Letters sent to Santa in Finland are delivered to Rovaniemi, right on the Arctic Circle, which has an official Santa Claus Village and an alarming amount of elf-related infrastructure.

3. “Jingle Bells” is not really a Christmas song. It was originally written for Thanksgiving and makes no mention of Christmas, Jesus, or presents at all, just horses and snow.

4. Tinsel was once made of real silver. Early tinsel used finely shredded silver, which looked wonderful until it tarnished.

5. Norway gives the UK a Christmas tree every year. Since 1947, Norway has sent a giant spruce to London as thanks for British help during World War II. It now stands in Trafalgar Square looking stoically festive.

6. The world’s largest Christmas dinner was eaten by penguins. The Australian Antarctic Division once served a full Christmas meal to researchers surrounded by penguins, who were unimpressed and declined pudding.

7. Christmas lights arrived late. Before electric lights, people clipped candles to trees. Unsurprisingly, this led to a strong festive association with house fires.

8. There is a Christmas spider legend. In parts of Eastern Europe, spider webs are considered lucky Christmas decorations, thanks to a folk tale involving a poor family and a magically glittering web.

9. Rudolph was created by a department store. He was invented in 1939 as a marketing character for Montgomery Ward, proving that even Santa’s team has a corporate backstory.

10. Christmas mince pies once contained beef. Originally Christmas Mince Pies include beef & meat, mixed with fruit and spices as a way of preserving it. Modern mince pies quietly dropped the beef centuries ago, but kept the name, which continues to confuse people every December.

Dunedin, Wild Horses

Merry Christmas

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Daily Photo – Merry Christmas from Me to You

Christmas in a small city in the South Island of New Zealand has a habit of sneaking up on you. One moment it is just another ordinary December day, and the next there’s a tree, a few baubles, and suddenly the year is asking to be wrapped up and put away. In this part of the world, even the decorations seem to carry a faint hint of salt air and southern light.

There is something reassuring about the simplicity of it. A tree, a bird, a name written proudly across a red circle. No snow, no roaring fireplaces, just the quiet understanding that Christmas looks different depending on where you stand in the world. Down here, it often means a BBQ warming up, jandals by the door, and the vague but persistent idea that a trip to the beach should probably happen at some point during the day.

Wherever you are today, I hope there is something small and familiar that reminds you where you belong. Merry Christmas from Dunedin.

Hard Bricks, Long Shadows, No Alibis

Puddle Full of Yesterdays

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Hard Bricks, Long Shadows, No Alibis is my ninth photographic series. It grew out of listening to music from a time when the world was recorded in black and white. Songs from the 1950s that felt stripped back, plainly spoken, and emotionally unguarded. Music made with nothing more than a guitar and an honest voice, when atmosphere carried weight, when texture mattered and when nothing could hide behind colour or excess. Music with no alibis. That feeling became a lens through which I began to relook at my everyday surroundings.

These photographs strip the world back to its bones. Light. Shadow. Surface. Weathered brick, worn timber, concrete that carries a thousand footsteps. By removing colour, the images refuse distraction and ask the viewer to slow down and look without shortcuts. What remains is structure and mood, the quiet tension between illumination and darkness. Long shadows stretch and settle, revealing form while also hinting at absence.

This series is about honesty. In black and white there are no alibis. No easy charm, no decorative escape, no place to conceal flaws or soften truths. Buildings stand as they are. Streets hold their silence. The camera does not explain or excuse. It simply observes and places responsibility back onto the art of looking.

Hard Bricks, Long Shadows, No Alibis looks at a familiar world without comfort or nostalgia. It asks the viewer to remain present, to accept what is revealed, and to resist the urge to look away or invent a softer story. In this space, there is no hiding.

I’ll be sharing this series of 24 images here on the blog, one each day at 6am. Consider this an open invitation to drop back here each morning and see where it leads.

Daily Photo – Puddle Full of Yesterdays

Hard Bricks, Long Shadows, No Alibis
Puddle Full of Yesterdays
2025
No 1 of 24

#dailyat6am, Canon Camera, Dunedin, Otago Peninsula, Ōtepoti, Travel, Wild Horses

Dawn on the Otago Peninsula

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A Glimpse At What’s To Come

Daily Photo – Dawn on the Otago Peninsula

Dawn on the Otago Peninsula has a habit of rewarding poor decisions. Decisions like setting an alarm at an hour normally reserved for bakers, fishermen, and people who have clearly wronged themselves in a previous life. I was back on the hills again, chasing first light, convinced that this time would be different, even though experience suggested otherwise.

The hills rolled out in front of me, looking entirely unimpressed by my effort. They have seen far more determined early risers than me. Māori travellers crossed these ridges long before roads or coffee existed, and later European settlers arrived with grand plans, questionable footwear, and a firm belief that fences would solve everything. The hills endured it all and carried on regardless.

Below, the harbour caught the sunrise and held it gently, as if aware that this light was not to be rushed. A lone cabbage tree stood nearby, doing its usual job of looking vaguely historical and deeply unbothered. These trees have been guiding people across this landscape for generations, and now one was quietly supervising my tripod setup.

As the sky slipped into shades of gold and fire, the tiredness faded, replaced by that familiar, foolish sense of triumph. Dawn does that. It convinces you that getting up this early was entirely sensible, at least until the alarm goes off again tomorrow.

#dailyat6am, iphone, Karitane, Wild Horses

The Adventures of the Whaleboat Māori Girl

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Daily Photo – The Adventures of the Whaleboat Māori Girl

Standing on the rugged cliffs of the Huriawa Peninsula near Dunedin in the 1870s, the crew of the Māori Girl watched for a telltale mist on the horizon. To look at their vessel, a mere 9-meter wooden boat – and then at their prize-an 80 ton Southern Right Whale (double the boat’s length) is to witness either the definition of bravery or complete madness.

Whether driven by a silver-tongued leader or the promise of a payday, these men possessed a courage that bordered on the impossible. Upon sighting a “blow,” they didn’t have the luxury of a mother ship; they launched directly from the beach, through the crashing surf.

The hunt was a test of raw endurance. Often, the crew spent over 24 grueling hours at sea, tethered to a thrashing giant that refused to die. They survived solely on their rowing strength and an intimate knowledge of the Otago coastline. When they finally towed their captured home, the struggle transformed into a community triumph, with the entire village gathering on the sand to turn the haul into a massive celebration.

#dailyat6am, Canon Camera, Dunedin, Ōtepoti, Wild Horses

Dunedin’s St Paul’s Cathedral

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Daily Photo – Dunedin’s St Paul’s Cathedral

In 1862, amidst the chaos of the Otago Gold Rush, the first St Paul’s Cathedral rose from the empty, muddy landscape of Dunedin’s Octagon. Constructed from Caversham stone, the church was an ambitious symbol of English heritage in a new and raw town. Unfortunately, the soft local sandstone proved to be completely unsuitable for the biting southerlies that whipped through the city, the stone crumbling so rapidly that the church’s elegant spire had to be dismantled within a few years to prevent a complete collapse.

Despite this, by the turn of the century the congregation had outgrown the rapidly decaying structure, so thoughts turned to designing a new, less collapsible building. Enter architect Edmund Sedding, who had plans for a cathedral of grand proportions. As the world descended into war during 1914 and 1915, the old Dunedin church was razed to make way for a Gothic masterpiece of reinforced concrete and Oamaru limestone. For four years, stonemasons laboured on a magnificent vaulted ceiling, the only stone-ribbed roof of its kind in the country.

Yet the shadow of the Great War drained both coffers and manpower. By 1919, the grand vision had stalled. With no funds left for the planned central tower or chancel, builders erected a “temporary” wooden wall to seal the end of the nave. In 1920, the truncated cathedral was consecrated, a majestic but unfinished torso of stone that would wait fifty years for its completion.

#dailyat6am, Canon Camera, Dunedin, Ōtepoti, Wild Horses

The Otago Coastline

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Daily Photo – The Otago Coastline

There’s something quietly wonderful about standing above the ocean and watching the land fall away beneath you. From up here, the coastline dissolves into haze, headland after headland, each one slightly less certain than the last. The sea moves with that steady confidence it always has, unconcerned by the surrounding hills or the thin lines of road carved into the slopes.

It’s a view that encourages slowing down. Not stopping entirely, just easing back a notch or two. You notice how the light skims the water, how the cliffs carry the memory of older shapes, how distance gently erases detail until only form and feeling remain.

This is the kind of place where thoughts wander without effort. Where the city feels present but politely distant. You don’t come here looking for answers. You come to let the questions stretch out a little, carried off toward the horizon.

#dailyat6am, Dunedin, Night Moves, Ōtepoti, Wild Horses

Dunedin’s Unity Park at Night

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Daily Photo – Dunedin’s Unity Park at Night

At night, Unity Park looks out over a Dunedin that does little more than whisper under the moonlight. The streets below glow in soft lines and clusters, streetlights tracing familiar routes down toward the dark, unruffled harbour. The peninsula becomes a suggestion rather than a place, its shape replaced by shadow and imagination. It’s a quietly satisfying view, the city settled, content to exist in the space between light’s edges, where you’re led away from the straight world into a place where details slip and time becomes misty around the edges.

#dailyat6am, Beach, Beach Life, Travel, Wild Horses

The Colours of Dusk at Blackhead Beach

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More from The Beach

Don’t forget you can click on the catergory names above each post to see more photos related to that place. For example, you can give it ago here with Beach, Beach Life and Travel.

Daily Photo – Blackhead Beach

I spent the evening watching the waves roll in a steady rhythm at Blackhead Beach. The colours of dusk lasted deep into the evening as they swept over the rocks as if in perfect harmony to classic symphony. Beneath an ever changing sky, offshore, an island sat quietly as if it too were patiently waiting for night to return.

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