SUMMER has different months all over the world. For example, in Australia, they celebrate Christmas at the height of summer. Summer there falls in December. Thus, the school year there starts from January and is divided into four academic semesters. Summer activities there include celebrations for the Christmas season. There are several festivities such as the Christmas Day dinner. While all over the world, Christmas dinner is celebrated every 24th of December, theirs is in the midday of Christmas Day on December 25.

They also get to have turkey during Christmas Day midday luncheons just like what Americans do on Thanksgiving Day. That’s also a similar practice in New Zealand. There aren’t that many Catholics in these countries and there aren’t even many Christians either. Some of the population is mostly composed of Chinese and they are like Buddhists. The same celebrations are replicated in several regions such as Tonga and Fiji. In Tonga, there are more Protestant celebrations rather than Catholic ones.

However, the malls in these places still have that jolly Christmas spirit. In the Philippines, summer is from March to June. It is here when children aged seven to twelve get down and dirty and bathe themselves in the river skinny dipping. This is where male children learn to be coming of age with such activities as going into adolescence, etc. They fly kites all summer long. There is really no formal summer camp here but some of the privileged few get to have tutorials all summer long and not just the academic kind.

There are tutorials for virtually everything else – from basketball to ballet, from swimming to gymnastics. One exciting thing to get focused into is choosing several martial arts to learn every summer. For example this summer, one may want to learn the deadly Israeli art of krav maga. Next summer, one may want to learn the French escapist art of parkour. And the summer after, you may want to learn the Balinese art of pentjak silat and the summer after that, the Brazilian martial art of capoeira. By the time one has integrated all these skills in adulthood, many companies and government agencies will go after him or her to acquire the person’s talent.

The rest of the population will want to troop to rather exotic and fresh areas such as the beaches of Boracay and Camiguin, surf boarding at Siargao or go deep sea diving and scuba diving at Palawan. That is the essence of summer in the tropical regions such as the Philippines and Thailand. In Thailand, summer is best spent in the beaches of Phuket. Phuket has a lot of foreigners, especially American ones and those coming from Hong Kong who visits each year to savor the beautiful beaches there.

In Europe and the United States and Canada, summer is experienced from the months of June to September. In those months, people go to typical summer camps which can range from enjoying themselves for a couple of days in the woods to being in a military-style barracks where discipline is the utmost concern.