Christmas 2022: Its Ups and Its Downs

Yesterday I met a colleague at Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus near Under den Linden. The café-restaurant in the basement was cordoned off, shuttered for Christmas Eve. But the rest of the department store was bustling. At the incongruous Ancient Egyptian sphinx sculpture in the lobby in front of the English Bookshop, free-of-cost gift wrapping stations were set up, where young attendants in uniform like a cross between elves and hotel pages were waiting to relieve the more hapless gift-givers amongst us.

In the end the colleague and I popped around the corner to share two plump American-style cookies, alongside a coffee and a hot chocolate, in a café. We sat on bar stools at a narrow laminate ledge at the picture window. And we chatted for hours, looked out at the grey scene on the Friedrichstraße (pricy, but not beautiful, with grubby yellow-and-red trains pulling in and out of the sombre latticework of the elevated S-Bahn station), compared notes on the shops, and exchanged gifts.

At least 4 or 5 units and groups of prospective or actual customers went in and out during that time, representing everything from looky-loos who just stuck their head in the door and abruptly took their trade elsewhere, to people who thronged in (well dressed for the winter weather; but it was 6°C) and offered effusive Christmas greetings.

The young blond man who was calmly overlooking the premises, equally practiced in English and German, took everything philosophically. The shop was so small that he probably couldn't help overhearing every single thing the colleague and I said, so while I didn't converse accordingly, hopefully it wasn't like listening to paint dry. At any rate he seemed to find us congenial, and it was a nice atmosphere.

[As usual, the talk of work wasn't the best idea, although I think I didn't introduce it. There have been 5 Christmas layoffs.]

We returned to Dussman before parting ways, looking at the racks with rock CDs from the 1960s, and both equally satisfied with our harvest. I bought The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society as a Christmas gift to myself, to crown my year of 'discovering' 20th century popular music for myself.

***

We started our Christmas breakfast at noon today. A North American red, poinsettia-patterned tablecloth from my paternal grandmother was on the table, and in the centre a German blue linen square cloth with printed old-fashioned house façades and stars from my maternal grandmother. Two white candles. Tin-foil wrapped chocolates in gold, blue, and red, white too. And then a white soup bowl for each of us, with Dominosteine, Lebkuchenherze, Spekulatius, Zimtsterne, etc. in it. We also drank coffee and ate Stollen filled with marzipan.

Then we sang 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' as we proceeded to the corner room to admire our Christmas tree (live, with fairy lights, and hung full of decorations by my youngest brother) .

Afterward we walked to the Kreuzberg. It was cloudy but the sun dissolved through the clouds. My exercise schedule had lapsed more than I'd thought: I felt like I was a boulder on two legs and to Ge., I rather badly quoted a Grimm fairy tale:

was rumpelt und pumpelt
in meinem Bauch herum?
ich meinte es wären sechs Geislein,
so sinds lauter Wackerstein.

Then I listened to CDs of Christmas carols and The Kinks while cleaning up the parts of the apartment I've been cluttering lately.

Yesterday my campaign to read a few more books and magazines by the end of the year took another triumphant turn: I finished reading The Adventures of Menahem-Mendl. Today, it was the June edition of a fashion magazine. The day before, maybe, I finished an e-book of The Glass Town, a graphic novel about the imaginary worlds of the Brontë siblings. Maybe I'll finally write in my literature blog again. Now I want to finish Assia Djebar's novel Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, although the cryptic syntax and vocabulary are emphasizing again that my knowledge of French is not so great.

(The same impression I got from watching maybe 1/2 or 2/3 of the 2022 French thriller Athena without English dubbing, on Netflix. Speaking of which, I'd found the role of right-wing supremacists unrealistic in that film's plot — reading the summary on IMDb because I 'noped out' of the film itself; while I still suspect that the urban fighting methods and psychology of the film are pretty thin, now I feel a little dumb about my dismissal of right-wing violence considering the deaths at a Kurdish community centre in Paris since then.)

Not related to the film, I'm finding that Christmas this year is generally Making Me Think. When dropping off the presents for Ukrainian children, I saw in one corner, almost covered up by other things, one of the spiky road barriers ('Czech hedgehogs') that are used to prevent military tanks from rolling into a city. — Sure, it had a plastic bar code on it, but it was still a harsh reality check to me. And in Dussman, an employee announced on the department store's public announcement system that this year, the red shopping bag is being used to raise funds to protect Ukrainian cultural property. A pax romana was no true peace to the people who had been trampled under the feet of Roman soldiers, but maybe I want the illusion back that not just Germany, but also the world generally, is doing OK.