Willfully looking up

I’ve had this blog entry sitting around in draft form for almost the entire month of December. It’s nothing terribly remarkable, and I’ll be honest in saying that I was more or less good with abandoning the post altogether.

Like a Mariah Carey Christmas song, the idea of wrapping myself in so many yuletide layers was starting to chafe

Posting absolutely nothing for the remainder of 2016 kind of seemed like a pleasant idea.  And why not? This year seems to have been filled with a disproportionate amount of negative news stories, and if I’m being honest, I don’t feel super jazzed about what 2017 is offering up. I also wasn’t born with the Polyanna gene, so sharing images of a German Christmas Market in full swing hardly seemed my style.

It’s Christmas time in Hollis, Queens..no wait, this is Stuttgart.

And then I got an email from a German friend of mine last night. He’s the one who told me about another lorry attack, this time at a Berlin Christmas market. He shared this news while replying to an email I sent informing him of an ambassador being shot dead in Turkey. Yes, my friends and I only email each other when we have very bad news to share.

I’ll have a mug of whatever she’s having.

In my international workplace, this year has been one long tennis match of serve-and-return consolation. When (one of) the attacks in Turkey happened, I bowed my head and mumbled words of compassion to my Turkish coworker. Then when the Orlando night club massacre happened, he came back and expressed similar sentiments. Later on we found ourselves soothing the French, or the Belgians…basically anyone walking around whose nation got touched by a brand of barbarism that has become mundane. And before you think I’ve gotten completely drunk on Western World Kool-Aid,  I completely recognize that I am only talking about drops in the bucket that dominate the media while even more ruthless acts rage on with limited collective flinching.  Argh.

Let’s just focus on the lights for a moment.

While I’m not one to react by losing myself in comparatively more fucked plot lines à la Westworld, I recognize that I can’t let myself stay too focused on all this negative matter. If I was constantly glued to the news cycle, then in no time I’d be completely pulled under with despondency. Lucky for me, my humanist side knows that there are bright things taking place every day that merit consideration. Like the fact of festive meeting places that provide folks a few precious moments of quality company.

Santa, we want some adult-onset diabetes for Christmas and by gum,  we’re going to enjoy it.

Like bees, we big kids are drawn to the neon sign promising hot beverages. These servings help to soften the edges of a season’s rougher parts.

Check it out, even Frosty has his own toilet facility here. Germans think of everything.

Not only Christmas eats and ornaments on sale, either. Just in case you suddenly realized that your vacuum cleaner needed a spare part, the market had you covered. Oh, Germany. 

Also, these things. What are they? I don’t get it- but they’re always on sale, no matter what country you’re in.

And finally, the stand selling the world’s greatest vegetable peeler. County fair or Christmas market, another ubiquitous product always hawked by a person wearing a microphone.

As I walked around the market, I didn’t feel the need buy anything. But still, the spread put on in Stuttgart was a refreshing escape from the bewildering London attraction with the misleading name of Winter Wonderland. I experienced that last year.  In Germany, I was more reminded of what it felt like as a kid at Christmas, back home when we got to check out the shiny and old timey lights of Edaville Railroad.

Good to see these guys got their own booth in Stuttgart– especially seeing as how they started all of this glowing rock-gingerbread heart-glühwein business.

If you’re still reading this, then I can only imagine that you were as hungry as I was for a bit of escapism. If I wanted, I could have kept this post on the heavier side and told you some other stories– ones that didn’t just document my evening spent snaking through pine-festooned stalls of temporary cheer. Indeed, over this season I have seen small but powerful acts of kindness extended to families who are spending this season in very uncertain circumstances. Right in my own community. I don’t even know if these folks celebrate Christmas, but that’s not the point. The point is I really do believe that when people are called upon to look after each other, at a very basic level most of us step up and do it. Sometimes it is really easy to feel hopeless about the world, especially with all of the terrible things that are going on, but Christmas market or a modest bag of anonymous Christmas gifts, both of them have their place in keeping the world spinning on its proper axis.

Thumbs up from the sausage guy. My goal is to be as cheery as him in 2017.

So maybe I do have a bit of Polyanna in me after all, or maybe I have simply found myself celebrating this end to a short work week with a glass of something festive. Or maybe it’s just five days until Christmas and it’s time to focus on the best parts of the season. Whatever the case, I know that we’ll be moving on to the new year. One way or another, we’re still going to have to move forward together.