Christmas Eve and Morn in Truly Exhausting Detail

For Christmas Eve we consumed turkey and chicken for dinner. The turkey was a seven-pounder, and something of a find since once we moved to Berlin we've encountered the beast far more often in piecemeal form. As far as its size goes, I did stare at it a little bemusedly, since the last time we had an entire turkey it must have been over 20 pounds as usual; and once we had a real leviathan. But even without the chicken there would already have been a heaping serving of meat for all, and in the inner cavity Papa crammed plenty of his delicious salty bread stuffing. On the side we ate mashed potatoes, the turkey and chicken jus, cranberry sauce, green peas, and Turkish flatbread, and we drank white wine.

During the following night I had a complex dream [Warning: almost certain to be terrifically boring; 'proper' blog post resumes beneath asterisk.] where T. and I roamed for interesting rocks on a low mountain on the Alps, where no trees but grass grew, and I turned over a coaly black boulder of sparkling-grained metamorphic rock to find mugs and other dishes in blue and white china. I thought it was an interesting archaeological find until I saw that one mug had the year "1937" written on it in the watery blue ink, and until the family which owned the land came wandering up for a picnic and reminded me that the terrain and by extension any objects in it were theirs. By that point the funicular which had brought T. and me up the slope had left for the valley again, and as the family informed me, it was the last of the evening. The stars came out and I even saw a meteor, but the rest of the dream took place in daylight; there was a modest beige palace of one or two levels which had been refurbished into a tourist centre and in whose colonnaded courtyard there was a garden, and I briefly peered inside it.

As we walked down to the family's home there was a deep turquoise lagoon among the cliffs which were the colour of dark clay, and one of the children lost his footing and fell off the clifftop into the water. Some of us dove in after him; I was closest but couldn't find him even in the crystal-clear water, since he had settled into the gravel at the bottom. Instead there were other men who had fallen into the lagoon and whose faces poked out from the gravel, as intact and immobile as those of the terra cotta soldiers in the Chinese emperor's grave; when we hauled them out of the gravel they became awake again. So I was reassured that the child was all right and that he would resurface in time. But then I was strangely pulled down into a clay element, to reemerge in a semimedieval kitchen, very dark and vaguely brown-walled, in the middle of a rectangular vat full of sluggishly boiling water, with a somewhat hasty cook flitting between her pots and stirring the water I was in with a big wooden spoon; and I felt doomed and damned.

I woke up in a much-perturbed and weighty frame of mind; and, to tie this all back into Christmas Eve dinner, came to the sleepy conclusion that if I wanted more lightsome dreams it would be better if I did not eat dinner so quickly and if, moreover, I had not eaten that additional slice of flatbread this particular time.

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Besides we sang Christmas carols and in my case tried to sing bits of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, which I have YouTube'd frequently of late, before which I had nearly gone hoarse singing all twelve of the "Twelve Days of Christmas." Then J. and Ge. and I staged a dramatic reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Adventure of the Three Garridebs." Around 2004 I rearranged the short story into a three-act play; we kept rehearsing it without much success, and after a while I refused even to try. It became rather a joke as Ge. would needle me at random moments by hailing me with Watson's first line of dialogue, and the scripts buried themselves amongst my other papers. But yesterday I fished them out again and it went reasonably well. Even my "received" British pronunciation was slightly better. Mama came by toward the conclusion of the proceedings, around the time when J. was overwhelmed with giggles at a rather untimely juncture shortly before his character pops a cap at Watson, and critiqued us here and there. Earlier Uncle N. and I hung up ornaments on our Christmas tree; this year we went with straw stars and angels and other figures, brightly painted wooden figurines, gilt-painted stars, three or so metallic balls, a bell, etc., and ranged small animals around the Christmas card which Aunt L. sent us from England.

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This morning, I woke up after 8 a.m. andwas, apart from my uncle, the first. I dressed in the Scottish kilt which my aunt K. bought for me, and which I like to wear at Christmas since it is bright red and very pretty, and then visited Ge. and J., who were surprisingly speedily awake. T. got up on her own and put on a delicately thin, dark blue flowered dress with a semi-Victorian collar and front, in honour of the occasion.

The table was already set with the plates, full of Spekulatius, oranges, mandarin oranges, apples, nuts, gingerbread in chocolate covering, chocolate, my beloved Dominosteine, tiny chocolate bottles with liqueur in them (come to think of it, there has been a sad dearth of brandy beans in our household in the last year or two), coconut macaroons which M. brought us yesterday afternoon, and marzipan with a thin chocolate shell. We had buns fresh out of the oven along with salami, ham, soft and hard cheeses, honey, and marmalade; we drank tea and coffee, black currant and peach juice; and on the refrigerator there were plates with heaps of the usual feast of fruit: a pineapple, mandarin oranges, two fresh green figs, ginger, dates, etc. As we ate, Mama put on a CD of the Messiah; when I was very little it used to be a record of the Messiah which she would put into our stereo system, but given the march of time and technological development it now plays from a computer.

During the breakfast, a debate arose as to what "myrrh" might be precisely, so I looked it up in our set of Encyclopaedia Britannica from around 1991, and aside from that we were mostly joking around.

Mama has been tootling Christmas carols on her French horn, and Papa accompanied her on the cello for a while. And now I think I have gone on long enough. What I will say, though, is that I have felt alternately filled with Christmas spirit and empty of it in the past few days. Not that I mind being grumpy, but I can be grumpy any day in the year anyway. What works best is to find a seasonal piece of music or a seasonal poem or something of the sort, wait a little, and see if I feel in the mood — instead of being pulled in two between contending impulses of sentimentality and pessimism.