Christmas Eve, in Retrospect

Yesterday I went to work for the morning of Christmas Eve. It was a quiet group of 8 colleagues that I joined, one of them my sister and two of them from the same team, so that was nice. I stayed 20 minutes late because I went out shopping in between — the grocery stores around the office closed by the time I would have gone home otherwise.

When I arrived home, Mama had begun plucking the parsley for our Christmas Eve dinner: radicchio and green lettuce salad with parsley and a vinaigrette à la Toto, green broad beans with olive oil and aceto balsamic and salt and pepper (I find this irresistible), lamb cutlets flavoured with butter and sage and garlic and broiled in the oven, couscous and Turkish flatbread, a bowl each of yoghurt and tzatziki, and our Wedgwood platter of antipasti: humous, artichoke dip, dolmates, sun-dried tomatoes, a tabbouleh of couscous and red pepper (/tomato?) paste and parsley, and three other dips of red pepper or tomato paste heated by varying intensities of spice. We also had a bottle of Spanish red wine and, on my insistence, Turkish delight.

It was not, in other words, too unlike what we've eaten every Christmas Eve for the past 15 years or so, and as delicious as ever.

***

I am not relaxed and indeed tense this year, because Christmas, New Year's and work are not cleanly separated. But at any rate I went for a run-and-walk in the half-deserted streets an hour or so after yesterday's dinner, after wasting time on the internet and never managing to achieve peak idleness. This week and (theoretically) the past one I have been running 50 seconds and walking 20 seconds, and yesterday I had to run for half an hour.

It was funny how buildings that are often shut were open, and places that are often open were closed. It reminded me of the paradox: make low the places that are high, and high the places that are low, from somewhere in the Bible. (In the German hymn "Mit Ernst, o Menschenkinder" it is written rather harshly as: "Bereitet doch fein tüchtig den Weg dem großen Gast; / macht seine Steige richtig, lasst alles, was er hasst; / macht alle Bahnen recht, die Tal lasst sein erhöhet, / macht niedrig, was hoch stehet, was krumm ist, gleich und schlicht." I don't think that crookedness is intrinsically bad, and do think God shouldn't hate; but the phrase 'macht niedrig, was hoch stehet' was what I was thinking of.)

Light shone from the Baroque church (at the kernel of an old town where the Seven Years' War led to death and destruction, and which is encircled now not by fields, trees or townhouses with Dutch façades, but by peaceful yet not very beautiful post-war apartment buildings); and from the police station in its 19th- or early 20th-century villa.

The post office, charity secondhand shop, clothing retailer, rope and pulley, pharmacy and other stores were dark and forlorn. Except a florist that sold flocks of tulips, despite the specks of snow and the frosty air. Turkish or other families gathered in the handful of cafés, restaurants and kebab stands, run by Muslim or agnostic neighbours, that were not closed for the evening.

The buses roamed alongside the sidewalks and gathered up a few lost souls at the stops; stray couples walked along together; and when I went past the barricades and earth heaps at a construction site, I thought that a mouse scuttled past.