Festive cheer: Milan Sladakovic along with (from left) son Goran, wife Vlasta and son Davor, prepare to celebrate the Serbian Orthodox Christmas. Picture: GREG TOTMAN
For many of us, Christmas has come and gone, but for Serbians, yesterday was the big day.
The Serbian Orthodox religion celebrates Christmas on January 7 rather than the Roman Catholic date of December 25 - though both dates mark the birth of Christ.
That's because the Serbian church follows the Julian calendar, which is 13 days behind the Gregorian version followed by Catholics.
Mount St Thomas's Milan Sladakovic and his family are among the region's Serbians who spent the weekend preparing for the celebrations.
"We can't do all the customs here like we did overseas but we're trying to adapt the customs as much as we could," Mr Sladakovic said.
One of the customs that has been adapted is the burning of an oak tree in the family home.
"The oak tree is cut and supposed to be burnt, which symbolises the warmth of the next year," Mr Sladakovic said.
"It's a custom that's thousands of years old; even before Christ it was common for Serbian people to do this."
Instead, Serbians here attend church on Christmas Eve and the priest burns an oak branch.
Churchgoers take a small branch to keep in their homes over the Christmas period.
Mr Sladakovic also puts straw under his table, which will stay until the third day of Christmas - a tradition he remembers from his childhood.
"Usually, when I was a kid, we'd put straw under the table, maybe 20 centimetres thick," he said.
"My mother used to put inside the straw, nuts, walnuts and all the sweets you could find in the house. Then the kids would look for them, like small chickens looking for food inside the straw. If you had a lot of kids there, they would almost fight for the things inside this straw."
While there is no gift-giving on Christmas Day, the Sladakovic family sits down to a big lunch. This includes bread made by Mr Sladakovic's wife, featuring crosses baked on to the loaf, as well as representations of various foods that a family may have traditionally grown.
"You put that on the bread to symbolise the prosperity of the year," Mr Sladakovic said.
"In recent years my mother used to put a coin inside the bread. Whoever finds the coin is the lucky one, he's the one who's going to have the most luck in the year."