White Christmas

Dutch winter landscape

After a week in rainy Turkey, I arrived back in snowy Holland late last week, on a landscape that was white, cold and slippery. For the first time in 10 years even the winter-loving Dutch were taken by surprise by the snowstorm over the weekend, a storm that busted transport systems not only across the Netherlands but also in Belgium, France and the UK.

Local news were full of winter blues with passengers stranded in train stations, highways and bus stops as traffic grinded to a halt, leaving thousands of commuters out in the cold, literally.

Snow truck on the road

With temperatures plummeting to minus 10 degrees Celsius (low by Dutch standards at this time of the year) driving from Eindhoven Airport to Nijmegen, which normally takes 45 minutes, almost took two hours with poor visibility, slow-moving traffic and intermittent highway detours.

On Friday and Saturday morning I woke up to clumps of snow festooned on the glass of the bedroom window. With a chill in my bones, the first thought I had was that I don’t even need fake snow dust to decorate window panes for a White Christmas!

Bikers have a tough time on slippery roads

Weather bulletins on Dutch TV warned motorists and commuters to restrict travel on Sunday. Bus stations were closed and what usually was the busiest shopping weekend just before Christmas turned out to be a non-event for shopping centres, a calamity for the retail sector which is counting on year-end sales to lift the moribund retail performance this autumn and last summer.

My weekend plan was to catch a unique exhibit of an illustrated miniature prayer book dating from the Middle Ages which is currently being displayed at the Valkhof Museum in Nijmegen, but without a working public transport system, I trudged back home in ankle-deep snow.

Trudging back home. Behind me the shopping mall complex

The numbing chill of minus 10 never fails to inspire me to voluntarily exile myself at home. After almost 11 years in the Netherlands I still have to get use to the winter blues, with the sun already down by 4 in the afternoon and darkness lingering up to 8 in the morning the following day. Oriental fish that I am, I must admit that I do miss the sun…

The long slippery road to the office, on a Monday morning

However, the chance of a White Christmas this week is high, a prospect the cheers up a lot of people.

I still owe 18th Moon readers assorted reports of my Hawaiian trip last July and the recent break in southern Turkey. Loads to write in the next few days…

In the meantime, here are some snap shots of the snowy landscape in Holland.

Enjoy!

Snow-swept highway

Empty bus stop

Wintry landscape in Holland

Do-Re-Mi

 

Julie Andrews does her TSOM routine

 

 “The hills are alive…”

Those lyrics and the accompanying shrill, rising sound always give me a cold, mordant, spine-tingling shudder as if my DNA and assorted genes are about to be diced and grated in a pressure blender.

Apologies to the legions of faithful ‘TSOM’ (The Sound of Music) fans out there, but sorry, I am not exactly inspired by Julie Andrews’s antics on the Austrian alps.

Maybe I am allergic to the touch and feel of knee-high braided socks. Or the sight of edelweiss.

Call me sour-grapes, Scrooge, and all the other associated s-words and f-words, but TSOM leaves me cold and unrepentant.

The key word here is ‘unrepentant’ because I suspect there is a global conspiracy to foist this ultimate 1960s feel-good movie over the heads of the world’s unbelievers and unfeeling mavericks.

At least in my generation (figure out which one) no movie experience and cinematic acculturation is complete without TSOM. It is a required viewing experience similar to the collegial dictum of passing your algebra, physics and chemistry classes. The bottom-line is no pain, no gain.

Everybody must have seen TSOM in my high school class. Woe to those who have confessed they have not for they will surely suffer in Level-A Limbo town, complete with rain fire and brimstone.

And no amount of teeth-gnashing renunciation can save your doomed soul should you confess to that Pollyanish girl in your sophomore class (the one with the braided pigtails and neat homework) who is only proud to testify and declare to anyone that she has seen TSOM at least 60 times before she has reached the age of puberty.

I viewed TSOM when my age turned double-digits and that singular experience must have triggered something metastatic in the lumbar area of my cortex region because while everyone was seeing the Julie-Andrews-light, I was aghast to realise that all the goodness and kindness and daisy-fresh perkiness of Ms. Andrews wouldn’t rub on me. I feel like an outcast in the midst of all that overwhelming kindness. This isn’t possible, I told myself.

Maybe I have 666 engraved on my scalp. Or am I a secret, closeted co-conspirator of those who persecuted the Von Trapp’s that the guilt just accumulated in me like rain on the gutter?

So while everyone is singing Do-Re-Mi, or ‘My Favourite Things,’ praising the joys of turning 16 and sticking plastic edelweiss on their ears, I was feeling lost and rebellious. I just don’t get the fun.

All of this repressed bad feelings and childhood trauma wouldn’t have revisited me this month if not for the fact that on Dutch television, the re-run of TSOM always comes or falls on Christmas Day. Every year.

Believe me, it falls exactly on Christmas Day. Not a day earlier, not later.

Instead of having a joyous and merry TV day on the 25th, I usually end up Scroogy, with two fat ear plugs sticking out of my ears, my head buried under two kapok pillows while the TVs in the neighbourhood go buzzing in high gear with the yoodle-doo-doddling of Julie and her puberal disciples.

“When you sing you begin with do-re-mi…”

Ouch. Aargh…!

All the manufactured goodness and hopping around on the hills that are alive stir in me the darker impulse to reach out and shove one of the pig-tailed Von Trapps rolling down the Salzburg ravine.

O kerstboom

 

Christmas tree displays at the local garden center in Malden, near Nijmegen.

‘O kerstboom’ in Dutch, ‘Oh Christmas tree,’ in English.

These days the Dutch are rushing to the garden centers and backyard growers of evergreen, a time when these trees in all shapes and sizes are cut, sold, bought, dragged, mounted and spruced up.

Buying a real Christmas tree is not only a time honored tradition in Western countries but is also an affair that involves the whole family. Everywhere in Nijmegen this week, I see young couples loading and unloading trees on their cars, whole families picking up Christmas trees from the garden centers, and trees already ´dressed to the nines,´ brightly twinkling behind glass windows.

For the first time in 10 years, there will be no Christmas tree or holiday décor at home. Sjef and I are travelling during the Christmas week to the south of Spain and we both agreed to skip this year´s rite of decorative passage, a year-end task that, at times, ends up in frayed nerves.

Signage for a Christmas tree sale in Nijmegen

But we still drove today to the nearest and busiest garden town centre to catch up with the Christmas rush and secretly enjoy the spectacle of people carefully puzzling over which ball to hang on the tree or what flashy ´bling-bling´ should trim or occupy that favored spot with the mistletoe.

On the way to the garden center, we passed by backyard growers of Christmas trees and, obviously, business remains brisk as we saw people dragging the netted trees, stacking them on cars or shoving them into the baggage compartment.

At the garden center, I was amazed to see how many Christmas trees were displayed en masse, waiting for the queue of diehard Christmas tree aficionados. There is a wide variety of sizes and breeds, some of them Eastern European varieties such as Serbian or Polish spar.

Christmas tree shoppers

I saw children haggle with their parents on the merits or demerits of a tree, and couples debating the peculiar scent or span of a branch. Judging by the frenzy and last-minute rush, Christmas tree selection is apparently no longer a simple affair but requires careful planning and logistics.

I also begin to wonder where all these trees came from, sprouting like mushrooms in the two short weeks before Christmas. I didn´t see them growing in our neighborhood´s backyard.  Is there an army of elves somewhere, secretly propagating a forest of Serbian spar, grown and trimmed to reach the exact height just in time for Christmas?

The garden shops or centers are, as usual, also stacked with all sorts of artificial Christmas trees, and the quality and variety are giving the real trees very tough competition. Some looked so real they come complete with pine cones, uneven branches, and variegated leaves. Others are already equipped with the ubiquitous Christmas lights, including the latest LED-blinking garlands that are, by themselves, almost complete light-and-show spectacles.

I promise some friends with reading deficiencies to keep some of my blogs short, so instead of sounding like Scrooge complaining about the excesses of Christmas tree decorations, let me just post here the photos made this weekend showing the general excitement in Nijmegen in this week of ”mass-Christmas-tree-massacre.’

Decor owls for Christmas trees

Christmas cards

I have a love-hate relationship with Christmas cards.

I risk getting zero, nada, nul cards this year for saying this but my ambivalent feelings towards Christmas cards are as strong as morning coffee.

Generally, Christmas cards are nice and amusing when you are on the receiving end. Besides you can measure your popularity or approval level with friends, contacts, family, distant relations and assorted buddies by the thickness or thinness of  the Christmas card pile that has accumulated on your kitchen table by New Year.

The fun, however, falls flat when one  has to go through the grind of choosing and sending Christmas cards.

 

Self made E-card for last year’s Christmas

As I write now my friend Sjef is buried waist-deep in a rising mountain of Christmas cards. Unlike me, he’s always punctual and disciplined in his Christmas mailing schedule, going through the pile with a methodical fanaticism that can rival Rudolph’s unfailing loyalty to Santa Claus.

Okay, I exaggerate by saying a waist-high card pile, but it is certainly not a joke to compose those little messages of holiday peace and cheer, card after card after card. By the second pile, I develop calluses on my thumb the size of two football fields and my chirpy messages take the nasal monotone of Ernie from Sesame Street.

Worse is to unwittingly insert the wrong card to the wrong envelope. Imagine mistakenly sending to your mother-in-law the tender and nostalgic note card meant for your long-lost lover.

I also adjust my card wishes depending on my familiarity or closeness to the receiver, with the tone going from warm, jovial, casual, witty to formal and business-like. It’s similar to wearing the proper clothes to the proper occasion. No Bermuda shorts for a gala.

One enjoyment I draw from sending Christmas cards is when I get the inspiration and time to make my own cards. I recycle bits of newspaper, gift wrapper, magazine clippings, buttons, and all other odds and ends to come up with something spectacular.

Sometimes the results can be described as ‘cool,’ creative and funky. Sometimes it’s a flop. Once a good friend remarked that in a manger scene I fashioned from thread and discarded cartoon, the Maria looked like she’s slowly strangling the Baby Jesus. Oops…! Sorry.

On the receiving side, there are friends who like to send the same themes over and over again. Dogs ( mostly dewy-eyed pups), snow skating scenes, burning candles….I can’t count how many cards I received with the classic combi of Christmas tree balls and angels.

Every time I received a card, I try to play in my mind how it travelled its way by bike, boat, or plane, across time zones and continents, through the belly of the postal system and its machinery of sorting, the routine of postmen dogging the early winter cold to finally land with a click in the small metal post box.

Hurrah…another greeting, another year coming to a close!