Teacher aide Mel Scouller at her Auckland home - most of the summer has been spent there as they can't afford to go away.

As January passes, workers are drip-fed back into airconditioned offices, skeleton-staffed rosters flesh out, posters announcing reduced opening hours are peeled from shop windows. The holidays are coming to a close, but what about the Kiwis who can't afford to take a break?

Summers when Mel Scouller was a child meant a week at the beach, kids crammed into the well-worn bach while a family of possums squatted in the long-drop outside.

Looking back, she recognises how hard her mum worked for it, but it was always guaranteed, that week at the beach. Now she sees it as "the ideal".

There has been no week away for her family this summer, no annual gathering at the bach or campground, none of those long blurred-together days marked by tides and sunscreen applications rather than dates and routine.

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This year they got lucky, though: two nights at a bach for mate's rates, $50 a night for the five of them. That was their summer holiday. The remaining days have been spent at home in the Auckland suburb of Mt Roskill, going to the beach, searching out free activities to occupy three children aged 8, 13 and 16.

DAVID WHITE/STUFF Camping might seem like a cheap option - but for some families, it's all money they don't have.

​Scouller spends most of her year thinking about the summer – more with dread than anticipation. She's a learning assistant at an Auckland primary school and, like most support staff, she's on a fixed term contract, paid only for the hours she works during term-time.

The summer holidays stretch out long after her annual leave is used up, so she spends the rest of the year budgeting diligently, putting aside a portion of each pay packet to see them over the dry season. "Saving for summer" conjures images of backpacking or extravagant cruises, but this is a survival fund.

Summer is made more stressful by not knowing if she'll have a job to go back to in the new school year; the way funding for teacher aides works means it can be uncertain until the last minute.

Still, Scouller is quick to point out her privilege – she has a husband, meaning there are two incomes to support their family, even if only one of them is paid over summer.

DAVID WHITE/STUFF Carefree summer days are far from the reality for a lot of Kiwi families.

Larissa Morris knows what it's like to try to get through the barren summer months with no extra support: "near impossible". She's also a teacher aide, based in Taranaki. She took the job when her husband died seven years ago and she was left to raise her two boys, now 16 and 17.

The first years were the hardest. Summers meant stress, bouts of depression, trips to Work and Income for an emergency benefit and fighting to keep a roof over their heads. Once, she was refused for food by WINZ and a local food bank on the same day. She had no choice but to "live without food and strip the cupboards completely bare".

Things have got a bit better in recent years. She has annualised her pay, getting the 40 weeks she works paid out over 52. But when her wages are spread out over the year, her weekly take-home pay comes in at less than minimum wage. Summer is tight; so is the rest of the year.

And so the past few weeks have been spent at home, not doing much or going anywhere. She says her boys are happy with that: "They understand we can't afford to do so much, so they don't ask any more". There weren't many presents at Christmas, and going on holiday doesn't cross her mind.

"You think going camping doesn't cost much, but it's all money you don't have."

David White/Stuff Working in hospo meant Chloe Ann-King has missed 15 summers with friends and family.

As soon as Christmas is over, Morris starts worrying about how she'll afford school books and uniforms – things haven't got any cheaper as her sons have got older, she says.

Robyn Parkes hears stories like this a lot. She works closely with the Nelson community as a budget advisor and manager of Te Korowai Trust. In the weeks before Christmas, the families coming to her are stressed, struggling and tearful.

Parents just want to be able to put food on the table and presents under the tree, and when they can't they feel they've failed, she says. Bookended by Christmas and back-to-school costs, summer is a "double whammy" on the wallet. Having kids at home all day means the food budget goes up, and for working parents there's the added expense of childcare. The cost of school holiday programmes varies widely, from $15 a day to more than $100 depending on the location, provider and activities – but often, parents end up working only for most of their wages to be funnelled into childcare.

Two parents might be able to tag-team taking annual leave to relieve the burden of childcare costs, but it depends on the industry you work in. For some, summer is the busiest time of year.

UNSPLASH The holiday season can be tough on the other side of the bar (file photo).

​Chloe Ann-King doesn't have childcare costs to contend with, but she's very familiar with what it's like to work through the summer. She's a writer and workers' rights advocate with 15 years' experience in hospitality – or, as she puts it, 15 years of missed Christmases, missed family gatherings, missed road trips, missed opportunities.

"It's really depressing," she says. Despite the well-known mental health benefits of spending time with friends and family, hospitality and retail work just isn't set up for it, she says.

"You might get Christmas day off and then you're straight back to work the next day."

It's rare to be allowed time off over the three-month summer season unless the business closes – and then workers face the same problem as teacher aides, having to take enforced leave without pay. There's little in the way of financial compensation for time missed with friends and families, Ann-King says. Public holidays are paid time-and-a-half, but there's no extra cash for the inevitable late nights and long hours.

Dean Kozanic/Stuff Escaping the city is a big part of what people associate with Kiwi summers.

When everyone is getting raucous at Christmas and New Year's parties, it can be a miserable time on the other side of the bar. Punters don't recognise that hospo workers are skilled, "and so they treat us like servants," Ann-King says. Blame it on alcohol, exuberance or end-of-year tiredness, but people also get a lot ruder during the holiday period, she says.

"The time that is often associated with spending time with your family, just having time out at the beach, is one of the most stressful times of the year for us.

"No rest for the wicked if you're a hospo worker at Christmas."

Even on Christmas Day, TC Munro was on-call at the boutique lodge she managed in the Bay of Plenty. If her phone rang, she had to be ready to make the 45 kilometre trip out there. The expectation of always being on was "overwhelming," she says – and not worth her $20-an-hour wages.

She's since moved to retail, working in a Tauranga toy shop where she at least gets Christmas Day to herself – but the shop is open on Christmas Eve and back in business on Boxing Day. She'll have to wait until February to take a break, when all her friends will be back at work.

Iain McGregor/Stuff Blue sky and baches: we have an idea of what the Kiwi summer is, but it's not always the reality.

Working in a public-facing role is draining, she says. By the time you get to have a holiday, "not only are you feeling physically exhausted, you're feeling really bruised," she says.

The shop attracts a lot of tourists from the cruise ships that come into the port, and Munro says it's tough comparing herself to her customers, "when you think I'm earning 20 bucks an hour and I'm never going to be able to afford that".

A cruise won't be how most of us spend the holidays. But there's a strong sense of what a Kiwi summer is: backyard barbecues, barefoot trips to the dairy for a close-to-toppling scoop of hokey pokey, the same patch of pohutukawa-fringed campsite. It's a chunk of time off, and an escape from the city.

But it's not the reality for a lot of people – and it never really has been, University of Auckland historian Caroline Daley says.

What we think of as the archetypal Kiwi summer is actually a "historical blip", particular to the brief post-World War Two period when New Zealand was prosperous, paid annual leave had just come in for all workers, and car ownership was becoming more common.

"The reality for most people most of the time has been that they are time poor and face financial difficulties in organising holidays," Daley says.

The promise of the long Kiwi summer really started to unravel in the eighties. New Zealand started to see seven-day trading, longer shop opening hours and a move away from standard employment contracts, the kind that guaranteed fixed hours and paid leave. Where the Christmas shutdown had once been near-universal, more businesses started to work through. Now you'd be hard pressed to find an industry that clocks off completely over summer, Daley says, except maybe the few days between Christmas and New Year.

If holidays weren't as long as we remember them, nor were they perhaps as carefree. People want to mythologise the bach or campground of their childhood, Daley says, but they overlook the work underpinning those holidays. The destinations typical to Kiwi holidays didn't mean a break from daily chores, which often had to be done on poorer equipment, likely by a woman: not everyone's idea of an ideal break.

"There's a lot of mythologising about summer, as if the sun was always out – it wasn't."

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