'Gravy Day' is an Australian tradition inspired by an unlikely Christmas song by Paul Kelly
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To many Australians, Saturday is more than just Dec. 21. It’s “Gravy Day,” all because of a lyric in one of the most unlikely Christmas songs ever written.
“How to Make Gravy,” written by singer Paul Kelly, has become a holiday classic in Australia over the past few decades. It was cited this week by the nation’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, as he announced a decision to release five drug smugglers from prison, and is the subject of a new movie that creates a story behind the song.
“It has become our most-loved Christmas song,” Jeff Jenkins, of the Australian publication The Music, wrote this week.
The story is set in a prison, the lyrics coming from a letter an inmate writes to his brother to pass along a recipe for the family’s Christmas dinner. The song is about much more, though, as “Joe” expresses regret, longing, fear, paranoia, some humor and the near-universal holiday emotion of someone who wishes to be somewhere else.
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The prisoner is writing, as the song says in its second line, on the 21st of December, “and now they’re ringing the last bells.”
The inspiration behind ‘Gravy Day’
Kelly wrote “How to Make Gravy” in 1996 after being asked to contribute to a holiday album being put together for charity. He wanted to record a cover of the Band’s “Christmas Must Be Tonight,” but someone else had already claimed it. So Kelly tried putting words to a melody he had kicking around.
Inspiration came from one of his favorite holiday albums, “A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector,” and Darlene Love’s recording of the classic “White Christmas.” Love includes writer Irving Berlin’s often-bypassed first verse, where the singer talks of being in Los Angeles while wishing to be somewhere snowy and cold.
“There’s a clue,” Kelly said in a TED talk explaining the song’s origins, and off he went.
The story of ‘Gravy Day’
In the song, “Joe” imagines the family gathering without him. “Who’s going to make the gravy now?” he said. “I bet it won’t taste the same.” He passes along a recipe, one Kelly got in real life from a former father-in-law.
The narrator asks his brother to kiss the sleeping children, and to “give my love to Angus, and to Frank and Dolly. Tell ‘em all I’m sorry I screwed up this time.”
He gossips about Mary and her new boyfriend. “Do you remember the last one? What was his name again? What was his problem? He never did get Nina Simone.” In performance, Kelly has occasionally replaced Simone with Joey Ramone or “a little too much cologne.”
He asks Dan to look after his wife Rita, and pictures the dancing after dinner. “Just don’t hold her too close, oh brother please don’t stab me in the back,” he sings, quickly catching himself to note the idle time in prison that “turns imagination into fact.”
The conclusion is a promise: “I’m gonna pay 'em all back.”
An unusual holiday song with lasting resonance
Kelly’s love for Shakespeare, the bard's mix of comedy and drama, is also evident in the composition. One of Kelly's first clues that he had tapped into something was a call from his real-life brother. He'd been driving and heard the song for the first time over the radio, and had to pull to the side of the road in tears.
It's a holiday song without mistletoe or holly. Structurally, it doesn't have a catchy chorus, or any chorus at all. Yet as years went by, his fans would request the song in concert all year, not just the holidays. Some of them began marking Dec. 21 by leaving a can of gravy on their front porches.
“I can't predict what songs will become popular or speak to my audience,” Kelly said this fall in an interview with The Associated Press, and “Gravy” is a prime example.
The evocation of family is the song's most important ingredient. Kelly's own large family gathers each Christmas Eve to sing carols. Bella O'Grady, a 27-year-old woman who moved to New York and attended a Kelly concert in New York this fall for a taste of home, said “How to Make Gravy” always evokes warm feelings of holiday celebrations.
Sometimes very warm. While many of the song's emotions are universal, a reference in the lyrics to expected heat on Christmas Day — “I hear it's going to be 100 degrees” — places the setting clearly in Australia. Down under, the holiday is at the beginning of summer.
Gravy Day in Australia this year
Prime Minister Albanese alluded to “Gravy Day” in his decision this week to release the five men who were convicted in 2005 of smuggling heroin from Indonesia to Australia.
“Australians speak about what it's like to have someone who's a loved one — they sing the great Paul Kelly song — in jail over Christmas,” Albanese said, according to The Nightly. “Who’s going to make the gravy? Well, these families had their loved ones in jail for 20 Christmases, and that was enough.”
Using the characters in Kelly’s song and building a story around it, filmmaker Nick Waterman made a movie of “How to Make Gravy” this year that is airing on the Australian streaming service Binge. It is being shown in some movie theaters free on “Gravy Day” weekend.
So what’s in that gravy recipe, anyway? “Just add flour, salt, a little red wine and don't forget a dollop of tomato sauce for sweetness and that extra tang.”
It’s all in the song.
