A proper Christmas

A month ago, almost to the day, I set a deadline to finish a Christmas advent calendar in the shape of a house that I had failed to finish for this Christmas just gone. I am always up for celebrations, parties and gatherings with friends and family and up till recently I had good or no memories of birthdays, Christmases, Easters and such celebrations, which can only be a positive thing. The last few years however, Christmas celebrations have started to become an unsettling, weird period of stress for me. I think it all started when a very urgent and dramatic house move happened to take place around Christmas and after that a snowball effect has taken place. The building up to Christmas with all the relevant atmosphere, so expertly crafted months in advance in the British Isles, I can deal with. The over the top, cheesy songs on the radio and everywhere else and the programmes on TV, I can tolerate. But when all of it is gone, instead of feeling a sense of relief or even an anticlimax of the excitement fading, all I am left with is weeks and weeks of tiredness and of picking up the pieces of what happened or what should have happened. Because I am often feeling torn between where to visit and who to spend the Christmas with, which always will leave somebody upset. Or even worse, if I try to organise a sequence of events to please as many people as possible, then I end up totally exhausted and haven't really pleased properly anyone at all. So I have lately started to feel mildly nauseated only by thinking about the next Christmas.

My old teacher at my Gymnasium School used to say to us something like this: "the key to an honourable life is to try and set right something that you feel you have done wrong at the first possible instance". So before I end up like a miserable old lady who whines about Christmas and because I have a little one who has the right to be able to enjoy future Christmases just like I did, I thought this year I would make an advent Christmas calender to have for many years to come. However, this Christmas was very stressful for me again and I never managed to finish it. But it is finished now and on purpose I have made it as Christmasy and as celebratory as possible, to remind myself that the next Christmas is going to be a proper one and that I should be very grateful that there are people around me at Christmas at all. The calendar is made of old Christmas cards, a Christmas paper plate for a roof and sparkly little pom-poms for door handles.

In Greece, Christmas is not the most important religious or cultural celebration of the year, but Easter is. So Christmases are more about the kids and the presents, but do not carry the same weight that they do here. We traditionally decorate a wooden boat with lights instead of a tree, although the Christmas tree is also used extensively nowadays. We have a Christmas dinner the night of the 24th of December instead of the lunch on the 25th itself, as is the custom in the UK. One of my best memories of Christmas was not at my house at all, but on the morning of the 25th of December when I went to visit a very good friend of mine, from Primary School, who lived in my neighbourhood. Her father was a German carpenter and he is one of the most memorable characters I have ever met.

He was a very huge man with enormous hands and he had transformed the back rooms of my friend's house into a workshop. He made a living by making custom made wooden kitchen units for houses in our neighbourhood. He was so good though, that he got customers coming from much further too, so much so that there was a long waiting list if you wanted to get his furnitures. His workshop had an amazing smell of wood and wood resin and he had the habit of leaving the French window doors open to the garden even in the winter. So the smell of the wood mixed with the fresh smell of the grass and trees outside and it was very pleasant. I cannot remember him ever really talking. He more did a kind of a grunting noise and movement of his head and enormous hands to communicate, but I am sure he understood everything going on in Greek. He had the German radio on really loud and also sometimes the cassette player on at the same time. For all the lack of him talking he had the most amazing parrot I have ever seen to compensate. They were given this huge green parrot from a captain friend of theirs who used to work in cargo ships to and from South America. The parrot's name was Buenos Aires and he spoke and shouted completely non stop in Spanish. I think he was trying to compete with the machinery, the radio and the music. It was almost unbearable to hear him if it wasn't so funny! We later found out that what he was saying and shouting were unspeakable, unrepeatable and horrendous words in Spanish.

In his spare time, my friend's father made her wooden toys. They were the most amazing wooden toys I have ever seen. He seemed to be producing them during the night, because when she woke up in the morning he had always made something small for her. Instead of an advent calendar with sweeties and chocolates, he made some little treasure maps, so that every day in December she had to search around the house using the map as an aid and find the little wooden toys he had made for her. That year she had already had a red wooden car with black wheels, wooden vegetables, a wooden doll with moving arms and legs and a wooden pull along duck amongst other things. On the day I was there we had warm pancakes with jam and strawberries and then he gave us the map for the last main present of that Christmas. We soon realised it was out in their garden and we looked around a large tree to find it. It was behind a rough spruce. It was a wooden doll's house. It had three floors, with two rooms each. A roof and chimney and doors. It was just perfect. We could not believe our eyes. We played with it for hours that day. He had also made for me a wooden horse to take home because it was my favourite animal.