that time of year

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose, Frosty the Snowman… it’s all starting to make sense!

Christmas imagery is undeniably winter imagery and the two do seem to be a natural good fit.

Firstly, winter is dark and cold, so colourful Christmas decorations and lights are an excellent way to liven it up. Secondly, winter is generally the more boring, dull part of the year: having Christmas in the middle gives you something to look forward to, with the associated parties, get-togethers and presents, etc. On a related theme, Christmas is invariably a time when you eat more, so it’s handy to know that you can indulge and hide any potential weight gain underneath a pile of thick jumpers, scarves and coats (rather than eating what you want, because hey its Christmas, but having in the back of your mind that you may be seen in a bathing suit in a few weeks time, so maybe another handful of chocolate covered nuts aren’t the best idea – okay this is probably just a girl thing, or maybe its just me) . Christmas also means at least two free days off work (including weekends, Brendan gets 5 full days and 2 half days, I get 10 without having to take any annual leave) – which makes a nice contrast to the Melbournian June to November no-public holiday abyss.

But summer or winter, its still remains that for something that is supposedly wonderful and fun, Christmas is actually stressful and hard work. Although shopping at Chadstone has given me panic attacks in the past, it now seems preferable to trying to find things to buy online (or not… as the reality probably will be – hmmmm sorry about that).

As we’ve always been lucky enough to have Christmas meals fully catered for by family at home and seeing this as the ‘normal’ thing to do, I wrongly assumed that we would be part of only a very small minority of people having to resort to a restaurant meal for Christmas lunch – maybe so, but everything decent looks to have been booked up months in advance (to give you an idea of what’s on offer, TNT magazine suggested two options in our area: 1 offered a two-course pub meal for £7.95, the other a five-course pub meal for £55 – neither seemed exactly right somehow).

Anyway, we got into a discussion about the fact that if Christmas is ultimately about spending time with family and we’re not doing that, does it really matter what we do anyway? (Kind of like if a tree falls down in the woods and no one is around to hear it - does it make a sound?) We’ve decided that yes it does, but probably not so much. So the plan is Carols by Candlelight at Royal Albert Hall and dinner out on Christmas Eve and a gourmet breakfast, then church, followed by present opening on Christmas Day, with possibly a walk to Hyde Park and definitely a hearty home cooked meal for dinner. Ok, it’s not the same… and at the risk of sounding too much like a sappy Christmas-special sitcom episode, although we will be here, our thoughts will be at home.

Damn, maybe if we’d planned it better we could have booked a trip to some non-Christmas celebrating country… maybe somewhere warm.

less than zero

Good lord it was cold in Berlin. We got snowed on! - A first, including times when we’ve actually ‘gone to the snow’. Lovely snowflake shaped snow like this:
and this .

There’s nothing like sub-zero temperatures to get you excited about London’s current 7-9 degree weather (or as a very small child said in a café the other day, ‘Its quite mild today, daddy’. I don’t know if it’s the accents or what, but children over here seem incredibly mature).
From what we saw Berliners don’t use umbrellas when it snows (I guess because its not technically wet). As proponents of the ‘when in rome…’ school of travel we decided not to use one either, but then when it was really, really snowing, we were happy to see at least one lady under an umbrella – it looked like she had just had her hair done – a very bouffant Iron Curtain-era affair.



In Berlin we stayed in the old east – which somewhat ironically is now the desired place to live. When the wall came down a lot of people just up and abandoned their apartments (what did they care – they were owned by the state and anyway they looked like this:



so a lot of artists and students took advantage of the situation and moved in rent free. They were eventually given squatters rights and now the area is home to loads of cutting edge cafes, bars, clubs, galleries and shops.

Ways to tell you are in the old east include the fact that trams run here (the west got rid of them shortly after the end of the war, declaring them ‘so 1942’) and through the pedestrian traffic signals – known as the Ampelmann.


The green ‘walk’ Ampelmann was apparently used to cheer the comrades along as they marched off to their jobs of a morning – you have to admit he does look quite lively. With reunification the people in change of the traffic lights wanted to replace them all with the more staid west german model. This was greeted by protests and petitions from the people, who essentially said ‘we didn’t have much in stinking east berlin, but hey, at least we had the Ampelmann!' Don't you think it's great that people can find positive memories even of an oppressive communist regime?