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.

Sunday in 1707: Winter's Chill and Star Watches

WAKING UP past noon to a pale grey Berlin winter day, it was difficult to regret not getting up earlier. My mother had fetched over the Advent wreath and its red tapered candles to the kitchen, and when I arrived a little coffee was left in the pot but everyone else had already eaten their croissant and returned to their rooms.

Wearing a woollen skirt was a good idea given the chilly temperatures, and wearing stockings with slippers over them too, but the 18th-century-esque attire would probably have been more practical had I thrown a scarf over the thin buttoned shirt and linen blouse that completed the look. Theoretically I should have taken out my bobby pins and tried a different hairstyle, but... meh.

THE FIRST Fall-Winter 2022 delivery (half the usual size) of coal for our stoves is melting away. My brothers and mother have already held several councils about how to lay our hands on more.

I'm abstaining from participating in these councils because I'm keeping my room at Arctic temperatures out of social and environmental principle. Only 2 bricks of coal have been fired this year, although I can also turn on an electric portable heater if I am genuinely suffering.

It turns out that our usual coal supplier is making its compressed bricks of coal available for larger power plants. For private households it is now only offering bags of loose coal lumps that are best stored in the old-fashioned way: dropped through a hatch into a cellar.

So we need an alternative. There are Ikea-esque stores around Berlin that have other sources and can promise to have available — or deliver — e.g. 3 bundles on a Saturday.

The long-term neighbours in this building have been merrily gossiping about all things fuel strategy for months; the tip about the Ikea-esque store comes from one of them. I'll confess to hovering in earshot from the stairwell, and eavesdropping on the latest 'deets,' whenever I catch a few words about coal.

My sister returned from a work trip to California in the afternoon, and my siblings and mother went to pick her up.

In the meantime, I played Lutheran Advent songs and Christmas songs on the harpsichord. In contrast to the Catholic song book, which has a lot of modern compositions, that I'd been using before, the Lutheran song book is has a lot of compositions that are Baroque-era or medieval.

Then I began cooking Baroque food again.

Our dinner was Schupfnudeln, which are delightfully pudgy, dumpling-like pasta. The sauerkraut that went with them was just heated straight from a store-bought jar.

Instead of historically accurate drippings, I fried onions, a parsnip left over from last week's Mesopotamian recipe, and a red pepper, in butter, and then added the pasta in there to get the nice golden-brown crust at the bottom. I'm still trusting John Evelyn here not to have deceived me about the existence of capsicum in 18th-century Europe, although I'm pretty certain a farmer in Swabia would not have eaten it often.

Deviating entirely from the 18th century, I prepared a stock from leftover vegetable cut-offs, added it to the Schupfnudeln water, and dropped in semolina and oyster mushrooms. After I taste-tested it, I added chicken bouillon powder. It was piping hot and the mushroom was a fair, robust ersatz for chicken meat. That said, I'd rather have cooked the vegetables and mushrooms fresh, instead of being too distracted to rescue them from the pantry a week ago when I should have...

When my family took longer to return from the airport, I turned off the oven (I'd also used one or two energy-saving techniques while cooking the meal itself) and began to read more of a 17th/18th century British literature anthology.

For the first time I became properly aware of Muggletonians, one of the English Civil War era splinter groups who were too radical for Oliver Cromwell. The Wikipedia page is a quirky read.

Besides the literary events of 1707, there were these political ones: the Great Northern War, Queen Anne's brutal policies with regard to Ireland, and the ongoing War of the Spanish Succession, for example.

But I'm eager to finish reading the dratted front matter of the anthology, since Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and others are awaiting!

The tea light that I used to read the anthology with was not especially strong and there was much squinting even if the beeswax had a nice fragrance. It would have been a good idea to experiment more with aluminum foil as a light reflector, but it's likely the lantern's position was too draughty.

In terms of technology, I've pretty much given up on not using modern clocks during my 1700s experiments.

But last week I stumbled across the fact that 18th-century Europeans could also tell the time after nightfall using devices called 'nocturnals', with little notches based on the positions of stars.

After the failure of the sun dial I'd prefer, however, to wallow in indolence longer, and not to hand-make the worst nocturnal known to humanity until my ego has recovered a little more. I feel like Toad in Wind in the Willows, only rather than chasing mindlessly after the newest fads, I'm chasing mindlessly after the oldest fads.

So This Is Christmas (Season)?

It's become obvious that there is almost no time where work is not stressful, so rather than proclaim that the sky is falling yet again, I want to describe some of my Saturday outings.

It was clear already that it would be difficult to reenact life in the year 1988. I have a long list of Christmas/New Year's tasks. One of them is to organize toys, because a Ukrainian colleague appealed to us on Friday to help with an initiative to brighten the lives of children in the Zaporizhzia region by preparing Christmas presents that a charity will ship there. So I went to a local drugstore and browsed the toy section to see what would 'spark joy' in any child.

After that I cycled to the former core of West Berlin in Charlottenburg, buying Christmas presents at a bookshop. Aside from the uncomfortable throngs of holiday shoppers, the Breitscheidplatz felt gruesome today. It's located where a major shopping street converges on the ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a vast square occupied by a Christmas market. It was also the scene of a deadly mass attack a few years ago. So it has tall speed bumps all around, and the clusters of genuine evergreen trees and strings of Christmas light are only fig leaves to hide extensive safety barriers. It's a bit like the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove, and it left me with the heebie-jeebies. When I was pushing my bicycle between the wooden stalls as I needed to reach the opposite corner of the square, a blue-vested security guard came up and told me in a kind tone to please take it along the opposite side of the street. So they are really not taking any chances.

It was more at Ernst-Reuter-Platz in the heart of the Technical University campus, where I began to feel 1980s vibes. The buildings were largely constructed in the 1950s through the 1970s, but the tech feel and the car-centric street planning and maybe a few other elements made me feel like this chimed in with my historical research.

But the shopping also had a bitter edge as I came across an information panel on a residential building, which listed the dozen or so Jewish neighbours who had been living here until they were shipped to concentration camps in the 1940s. Two 'Stolpersteine' were embedded in the pavement.

After that, I went to morally support the choir I've been trying out for, in their annual Christmas carol concert. As part of a last-minute drive to read more books before January 1st, I took along Sholem Aleichem's Menahem Mendel and progressed a bit.

Cycling back along the Straße des 17. Juni, basically a twin strip of motley parking lot which has gained a reputation for prostitution and drug drops, a hopefully less patronizing variant of 'Do they know it's Christmas?' came to mind. Singing 'Ding dong, merrily on high' seemed a little removed from reality.

It was dark after the concert. After getting a bite to eat once back at home, I first sat down to draw more handmade Christmas card motifs (using an old New York Times Style magazine issue for inspiration, and reading the articles while I was at it).

Then there's the long list of tasks I haven't tackled yet:

1. Reserve seats at a restaurant for teammates, making sure first that teammates who never check messages have a chance to complain about which day it's being booked on

2. Order gifts for teammates who cannot make the restaurant and verify what replacement gift to get for someone whose first pick has sold out. Keep in mind when they will be out-of-town for the holiday season and will thus be unable to receive a delivery.

3. Sort out the last details of a goodbye present for a departing human resources colleague, likely a card and then cycling to the office to finish the wrapping and hand it over to a current HR colleague.

4. ...

I don't want to suggest that I don't genuinely enjoy planning and implementing gifts etc. But in the past year I've felt like I'm working 5 times as hard to generate social rapport, without getting much energy in return. It's probably due to Covid and social distancing changing how we interact as colleagues. But combined with implementing a lot of things at work that I don't genuinely agree with, impostor syndrome whenever I get together with fellow team leads and it becomes clear yet again that I'm not a proper engineering manager and am only being granted special peewee league recognition, losing touch with a lot of colleagues whom I deeply trusted and enjoyed working with, and as usual finding that if I'm doing poorly other people are also doing poorly and it's good to spend a little time listening to them and finding the right things to say (or not say), it is draining the life out of me.

At least I've taken next Friday off. But it's likely another godforsaken surprise decision or important meeting will ruin that holiday too.

I've been researching the year 1989 in preparation for next Saturday. Inspired by Back in Time for Dinner, Back in Time for the Weekend, and Supersizers Eat ... The 1980s, I've just played Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Pong, and Arkanoid (which was not new to me, thanks to the siblings), in an online free arcade. Besides, I've already listened to the top hits released that year: Aside from the Paula Abdul and Bette Midler singles that everyone knows, I took time for Natalie Cole's "Miss You Like Crazy" — and Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" because it's the first song of theirs that has a nice rock edge.

***

'Work From Office'-Gate has been defused by our managing director, who encouraged us all to file exception requests. This came after I'd written a long request in which I did go into gory details, crossing a work-life Rubicon I'd rather not have crossed. Either way, I went to the office fairly voluntarily again on Friday. But after having delved (while writing my exception request) into memories of medical emergencies witnessed during the past, I was not in a great frame of mind for the commute. I felt myself having strong physical anxiety when a police car and ambulance crossed an intersection in front of me, breathing quickly and getting blurry vision, and thought 'This isn't so great.'

That said, it was nice to work opposite M.

I also met the Korean office cleaner again, who is really nice and who also inspires some faith in humanity because she doesn't have the battle worn air of other cleaners in the past. As she doesn't speak much German, let alone English, I'm hoping to ask her to teach me 'hello' and 'thank you' in Korean, and to learn something more on Duolingo.

I also met a German security guard. She mentioned that the office Christmas tree had to be set up without fairy lights this year, so she tried to make it as sparkly as possible; and she seemed pleased when I said that I'd never have been able to decorate it so neatly.

Ending the Work From Home Era?

On Friday I took the day off work.

But at 3 p.m. I returned a little reluctantly for a middle managers' meeting, to hear more information about my company's new return-to-work policy. The policy is that starting at the end of February we would have to return to the office for at least 4 days per week.

It was announced to middle managers like me per hastily scheduled video call from a head of the Europe-Middle-East-and-Africa section of our parent company, on Monday morning. This was followed by a rambling email (hours later than promised) to the whole company by our CEO, and then a question-and-answer video with the CEO on Wednesday.

Of course this is better than Elon Musk's dictum that people who aren't working in the office don't belong in his company.

But my team was unexpectedly firm in not wanting to return to the office, and spent the first day after the announcement moping.

I felt more philosophical at first, but then also became annoyed by the lack of understanding from the company leadership about the worst challenges that my colleagues were facing. I also began to realize how much this ruling invades our privacy.

Is it really nice to ask teammates to detail the private pain that they often see elderly people who are seriously ill and that they are afraid of infecting them with seasonal viruses that are deadly to weakened immune systems?

Is it really fair to ask colleagues to 'out' chronic health conditions that they prefer not to mention in work contexts for the sake of not having to deal with it for at least a few hours per day, or fair to ask them to declare mental illnesses of which they may be ashamed?

— The policy is: If colleagues want an exemption from the 4-day rule, they must fill out a questionnaire. The inputs will be read and evaluated by their direct manager (e.g. me), the managers above their direct manager including people whom they have never met, and human resources personnel whom they have never met.

Moreover, although this is likely confidential information I'll spill it anyway, the human resources team expects 40-50% of employees to ask for an exemption.

Apparently a company that just fired 20% of its workforce and is not backfilling roles of people who left for other reasons before and afterward, which has been hell for the employees who are left with the larger workload and the loss of trusted workplace friends... is willing to spend massive amounts of time and personnel on processing thousands of remote work exemption applications. This is a process that adds absolutely no value to our product, for our shareholders or for any ordinary person or company who uses our services.

Which brings me to the putative justification for the 4-day work policy: Togetherness. The idea being that we will be happier, more collaborative, and have a nicer working culture if we are all together in the office, like a happy family.

One of my teammates joked that Rick Astley's late 1980s pop hit Together Forever should become the team anthem.

The problem is: the company's leadership has extremely narrow view of Togetherness. What about the needs of parents who, weirdly enough, might like to be Together with their children — their actual family? What about those of us who'd have liked to be Together with colleagues who were fired over the past year? What about those of us who would be happier spending more time Together with our friends and relatives outside of work?

I was also angry that apparently only commute times 1.5 hours or longer will be considered even remotely uncomfortable by our American superiors. As a bit of a would-be architecture and city planning nerd, I know that Berlin is laid out quite differently from many American cities. Moreover I consider a live-in-the-suburbs-and-commute model unenviable for humane reasons and for environmental reasons (consider the harm that 2 or more hours of car driving do). With this news, I've lost hope that 1 or 2 of the teammates who live quite far away from the office will get the no-fuss exemption I'd expected for them, and which would have allowed them and me to get on with our lives.

Intermittently I've done nice things yesterday and today — like go shopping in little neighbourhood shops for assorted Christmas things, and indulging in food experimentation by cooking a Mesopotamian root vegetable stew from a historical recipe book as well as sweet potato pancakes with kimchi mayonnaise. In the evening, fifteen of us had a lovely, hearty restaurant meal as a family with visitors from western Germany.

In the late afternoon, I'd gone for a walk in the snowy landscape, green grass and yellow or brown leaves scattered through or just beneath the surface of the thin layer of snow, to the allotment gardens. I had bought a beautiful bouquet of red tulips from a florist's store; and the grainy grey snow sky had the traditional wintry, blankety look.

Only two or three groups of people were walking in the gardens, so I was almost left alone to commune with nature. (And to think of Robert Frost's poem, perhaps inspired by subconscious associations via 'Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening': Two roads diverged in a wood... I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.)

And when a wind chime rang quietly from a hidden garden nearby, I felt a moment of wonder and a vague 'memory,' and realized that it reminded me of Narnia and the White Witch's sleigh and (admittedly bewitched) hot chocolate and Turkish delight.

... But I've also been stewing in work-related anger, and the lovely vacation and weekend are not as relaxing as I'd hoped.