A ‘Summer Wonderland’

The video above is from Air New Zealand, and they describe it well: “Finally, a festive tune we can get behind here in the Southern Hemisphere”. The video is fun, and takes as its starting point the utter absurdity of North Hemisphere imagery and song lyrics celebrating Christmas in what is summer here.

The video features vocals by Ronan Keating (he has an official website), who I first knew as a member of the Irish boyband Boyzone (the band also has an official website). Since then, he’s gone on to a solo career and has also been an Australian talent competition judge. Ronan being the singer is part of the joke, since he’s from Ireland and Christmas in New Zealand is very different from what he grew up with. I thought he did a good job with his part.

The boy is 14-year-old Julian Dennison (see also his NZ Onscreen profile), a child actor best known in New Zealand for playing Ricky in the hit New Zealand film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople (film trailer below; see also the official website). Julian has been doing some small roles since Wilderpeople, including a TV commercial that’s been in heavy rotation, so he’s quite familiar to New Zealanders. He also counts us in to the song Māori at the start of the recorded version.

In the Christmas spirit, Air New Zealand made an MP3 of the song available as a free download, along with the lyrics and the sheet music, all of which is nice. I have a hunch we could be hearing it a bit this summer.