Traditions on Christmas Eve

This morning Ge. and T. bought our Christmas tree from the stand just down the street. It is a plump fir, about four foot tall, and it cost fewer than 30 Euros. With Ge.'s help, Mama set it up on a table in the corner room, and then decorated it.

In the afternoon I decided to go to the Christmas fair at Unter den Linden. So I set off in the U-Bahn, which was not as empty as one might expect, emerged at Französische Straße, and leisurely strode along the two blocks to Unter den Linden. The linden trees have been illuminated by slender tubes of lights that run along the branches, a river of light along which the dark, warmly swathed shapes of passersby made their way. The people were mostly wandering in groups and speaking French or Polish. In front of the Staatsoper an ice skating rink was open, so a modest crowd swept to and fro on it to music, or watched from the perimeters, and two rows of white tents offered seats and warm food and corporate advertising. I walked through to the actual Weihnachtsmarkt. The wooden huts were shuttered up, the cobblestones swept clean, but the scent of frying lingered.

On the way back I decided to walk a station further to Stadtmitte. Friedrichstraße was as subduedly lively as Unter den Linden and it was well-lit. At one point a homeless person was sitting cross-legged with blankets draped over his lap, leaning with his back against the pillar of a building and plunged in its shadow. Though I am usually in a "trust no one" mode when I go out, I forgot this for a moment in sympathy. I was wishing that I could get him cocoa or a hot bun or something of the sort, when he asked whether I had any change. So, for once, I sorted out the large coins (which were not many) in my wallet and handed them over.

At Stadtmitte I stepped into the wrong train through absentmindedness, and ended up at Französische Straße again after all. I forgot my stupidity as I plunged into my present U-Bahn reading, which is Jules Verne's highly readable Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours. I've come as far as Hong Kong, where the detective Fix perfidiously renders Passepartout unconscious with an opium pipe, and Phileas Fogg and Aouda set forth on the Carnatic. At Mehringdamm I had to switch to the U7 line and waited for six minutes for the next train to arrive. The platform was nearly deserted. At a brick pillar a deep-voiced man was holding forth on sociopolitical matters in slow Caribbean-accented English interspersed with the occasional "mon," and a woman was murmuring assent or laughing in warm but oddly vacant tones. An elderly lady passed by and asked her companion about the Christmas service at St. Marien; on the bench a young man briefly phoned and then waited, hunched over and hands clasped, for the train to arrive.

At home, Mama was preparing dinner: fish, bulgur wheat, tomato salad, and a white sauce with dill and green peppercorns. Papa was watching television. There was one immensely kitschy Christmas concert after another, though one channel varied the entertainment with a documentary about the death of Princess Diana. But then we came across El Dorado, a film with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. We watched it beginning where Wayne, his new-found friend "Mississippi," and the deputy sheriff concoct a powerful brew of herbs and gunpowder to sober up the sheriff Mitchum, who has been drinking heavily for over a year and is not in the condition to face the band of villains who are threatening him. I find the film most enjoyable. I like John Wayne films in general, but often, as far as I remember, they are too humourless and depressing.

After dinner, we each hurried off to our rooms again. Papa and Mama finished setting up a low shelf that will hold our record collection and will even accomodate the shelf that holds much of our English literature on top. Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium ran on the radio in the background. Until around eleven-thirty I checked my news sites and watched the Queen's first televised Christmas message, broadcast in 1957, on YouTube. It was a concentrated piece of Zeitgeist, elaborately staged, and delivered in Her Majesty's amusingly idiosyncratic high-pitched and sharp voice that verged on sing-song. Her speech seemed the quintessence of the mentality of the hidebound and archaic British nobility; she spoke in her aristocratic accent about the Commonwealth, mentioning in passing that Britain had won the respect of nations by being "honest and kind," lamented the decay of tradition, and in true Victorian vein read aloud a passage from the Christian allegory Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.

At midnight Papa and Mama opened a bottle of red wine, of which they and Ge. and I partook; and we all gathered in the corner room to sing Christmas carols: German, English, and French. We collapsed into giggles during the "Angel Gabriel," because when we reached the line, "most highly favoured lady," we all had in mind the pastiche "most highly flavoured gravy." Hilarity also broke out during "God Rest You Merry Gentlemen," when we came across the lines, "The witch His Mother Mary/ Did nothing take in scorn." (The proper words, I believe, are, "The which His Mother Mary.") As we were singing "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," the doorbell rang, and W. briefly joined our round.

Television in the late night was full of familiar films. First of all, we watched Casablanca, until shortly after the scene where the patrons of the café sing the "Marseillaise" and drown out the nationalist tunes of the overbearing German officers. Then, before going to sleep, we watched Arsenic and Old Lace with Cary Grant and Peter Lorre. So this Christmas Eve has been a curious mixture of the old and the new.