Generally, at this time of year, most people's worries are centered around Christmas as they make their last-minute preparations for the big day.
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But on this day in 1962, an unexpected issue had arisen right before the beloved holiday - the stench of rotting fish at Lake George.
Over the previous week, masses of fish had been dying for no apparent reason.
Mr. H. R. Horsburgh, the vice president of Canberra Aquarium Society, was a member of a team of fisheries experts who went to the lake on a mission to find out what was causing the deaths.
He described the stench which emanated from the rotting fish as "absolutely unbearable".
He was not alone in this thought - tourists had abandoned their plans of visiting the lake, deterred by the mounds of dead fish which littered the lake shores.
"The number of dead fish is so tremendous that the average person would scoff until he saw for himself," Mr Horsburgh said.
A possible cause of the deaths was a fireball which fell into the lake in an electrical storm a couple weeks prior.
Mr Horsburgh said that fisheries authorities were reluctant to theorise on the cause of the deaths.
One thing was for certain though - unless the sight of rotting dead fish was on the holiday bucket-list, Lake George was a stop to be skipped over the Christmas period.
