Last night I finally wrapped all my Christmas presents, to the blaring soundtrack of the final disc of Doogie Howser Season 1. I’m so relieved to be done with it all (the wrapping, not my Doogie Howser marathon!)
There has only ever been one Christmas that I didn’t spent with at least part of my family—Christmas 1994, when I was studying abroad. For the holiday I went to Germany, where I spent about 10 days with two friends (Laura, a friend from home, and Dave, a friend from college) who were studying in Marburg for the year. Had this opportunity not arisen, I probably would’ve weaseled my way into spending Christmas with Annida at her parents’ house in Greece. Going home was always an option, I suppose; instead of paying for me to go to Germany, my family could’ve just paid for me to return to the States instead. But, although I missed everyone a lot, I didn’t want to go home until my time at Goldsmiths was finished. I just didn’t think it’d be good for me to interrupt my year abroad with the culture shock of returning home.
For the most part, I enjoyed my time in Germany. Laura, Dave, and I went on a university-organized day trip to the medieval city of Rothenberg, which was really beautiful. Marburg, with its high-on-the-hill fairy tale castle, was beautiful, too. Laura and I went to Gießen for a day as well. I went to Laura’s orchestra practice with her one evening, meeting a Goldsmiths student who was studying in Marburg for the year. I committed fare fraud and got caught (just like I did in London!). I went to school with Laura one evening, and while she attended her Finnish class I made photocopies for her and hung out in the lobby, watching people go by. We hit the email lab so I could worm my way into my Goldsmiths and Scranton email accounts and look for new messages. We went grocery shopping and spent much time hanging out with Laura’s American friends, many of who came from our area of Pennsylvania (since they were studying in Marburg through a Millersville University [in Lancaster County, PA] study-abroad program). It was strange and wonderful to be around so many Americans and native Pennsylvanians again. One of them had a boyfriend visiting from Lancaster, and he brought a stack of celebrity gossip magazines from home, so I was in heaven. Also? I discovered that Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which was at that point my favorite cereal and which wasn’t sold in England, could be bought in Germany, under the name Cini-Minis. Our reunion was utterly glorious.
There were some downsides, unfortunately. Clinical depression doesn’t just evaporate when you cross the border into an exciting new country. It was tough being away from my family on Christmas for the first time, and not having any presents to open on Christmas day. The temperatures in Germany were far colder than they were in England, and since I didn’t pack appropriately, I was always freezing. Marburg was very hilly (whereas London is quite flat), so I felt constantly exhausted and sore. I got sick not long after my arrival, and my full-throttle cold made me feel even chillier and more exhausted than I already was. Plus I’d started the pill in November and it made me periodically hemorrhage; sadly, this excessive, grotesquely messy, and energy-draining bleeding overshadowed part of my time in Germany.
Laura and I celebrated Winter Solstice with a silly ritual we kind of made up as went along. First, she read my medicine cards. It began snowing, which made us deliriously ebullient, and we ran outside into the snow-lit evening, dancing around and catching snowflakes not just on our tongues but also in a shot glass. To fill the glass we also had to scrape some snow off tree branches. Back in Laura’s room, we burned some leaves she had collected over the autumn, chewed on some stems, anointed each other with the burned leaves, melted the shot glass snow with a big purple candle, and drank a mixture of the melted snow and burned leaves. We went out onto her balcony and uttered wintertide blessings we created on the spot as we dropped a burned leaf and watched it twirl downwards.
On Christmas Eve Laura, her friends, and I hung out in their kitchen, cooking, chatting, relaxing. A bunch of her friends were vegetarians and vegans, so I had loads of meat-free food to enjoy. At night, after dinner and after a relaxing day of playing Monopoly and Jenga and reading People magazine, we went to midnight mass at some Catholic church, even though most of us were areligious. Of course I couldn’t understand a word being said (my German language knowledge extended to please, thank you, hello, blood and milk—the latter being ever so helpful), but the service was still magical.
Christmas morning brought vegan pancakes, which were followed by a walk through the forest. Well, it was supposed to be a simple walk, but it really turned into a death march of sorts after a while. Laura, bless her heart, was fit as a fiddle and had no problem bounding around the woods’ steep hills at a steady clip. I, on the other hand, was out of shape, out of breath, shivering, congested, coughing a watery cough, sore, bleeding profusely, inadequately dressed. We got lost, too, which meant our hike went on and on, world without end. I really became concerned after a while, thinking we’d never make it back to her dorm as we threaded our way through the utterly still forest. I even began crying a bit toward the end, so devoid of hope was I that we’d ever find our way home—at least before dark. After roughly eight hours of this, we finally managed to stumble back into her dorm at dusk. I was beyond exhausted and couldn’t feel my feet anymore. But I did warm up and cheer up while eating her friends’ vegetarian Christmas feast. After that I not-so-patiently waited for them to stop using the phone to talk to their families so I could talk to my own family back in States. At night we hung out and watched Father of the Bride, which was of course in German, so none of it made sense to me.
On Boxing Day Laura and I headed to Frankfurt, where we poked around the city for a bit in the snow while waiting for our flight to London (she came back with me for a week or two, and we commenced a reunion with three of our friends from home who were also visiting for a week or two). It was stupid of us to fly into London on Boxing Day, though; public transportation was nearly nonexistent, and the commute from Heathrow to my dorm—which generally only took two hours, at most—took over seven hours and required a complicated tango of maneuvering our way through the warren of the city on bus, tube, feet, and taxi.
That, in a nutshell, was my only non-family Christmas!
song heard most recently before posting: New Year’s Day/On Christmas Night—Bonnie Rideout, Maggie Sansone, Al Petteway, Eric Rigler
There has only ever been one Christmas that I didn’t spent with at least part of my family—Christmas 1994, when I was studying abroad. For the holiday I went to Germany, where I spent about 10 days with two friends (Laura, a friend from home, and Dave, a friend from college) who were studying in Marburg for the year. Had this opportunity not arisen, I probably would’ve weaseled my way into spending Christmas with Annida at her parents’ house in Greece. Going home was always an option, I suppose; instead of paying for me to go to Germany, my family could’ve just paid for me to return to the States instead. But, although I missed everyone a lot, I didn’t want to go home until my time at Goldsmiths was finished. I just didn’t think it’d be good for me to interrupt my year abroad with the culture shock of returning home.
For the most part, I enjoyed my time in Germany. Laura, Dave, and I went on a university-organized day trip to the medieval city of Rothenberg, which was really beautiful. Marburg, with its high-on-the-hill fairy tale castle, was beautiful, too. Laura and I went to Gießen for a day as well. I went to Laura’s orchestra practice with her one evening, meeting a Goldsmiths student who was studying in Marburg for the year. I committed fare fraud and got caught (just like I did in London!). I went to school with Laura one evening, and while she attended her Finnish class I made photocopies for her and hung out in the lobby, watching people go by. We hit the email lab so I could worm my way into my Goldsmiths and Scranton email accounts and look for new messages. We went grocery shopping and spent much time hanging out with Laura’s American friends, many of who came from our area of Pennsylvania (since they were studying in Marburg through a Millersville University [in Lancaster County, PA] study-abroad program). It was strange and wonderful to be around so many Americans and native Pennsylvanians again. One of them had a boyfriend visiting from Lancaster, and he brought a stack of celebrity gossip magazines from home, so I was in heaven. Also? I discovered that Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which was at that point my favorite cereal and which wasn’t sold in England, could be bought in Germany, under the name Cini-Minis. Our reunion was utterly glorious.
There were some downsides, unfortunately. Clinical depression doesn’t just evaporate when you cross the border into an exciting new country. It was tough being away from my family on Christmas for the first time, and not having any presents to open on Christmas day. The temperatures in Germany were far colder than they were in England, and since I didn’t pack appropriately, I was always freezing. Marburg was very hilly (whereas London is quite flat), so I felt constantly exhausted and sore. I got sick not long after my arrival, and my full-throttle cold made me feel even chillier and more exhausted than I already was. Plus I’d started the pill in November and it made me periodically hemorrhage; sadly, this excessive, grotesquely messy, and energy-draining bleeding overshadowed part of my time in Germany.
Laura and I celebrated Winter Solstice with a silly ritual we kind of made up as went along. First, she read my medicine cards. It began snowing, which made us deliriously ebullient, and we ran outside into the snow-lit evening, dancing around and catching snowflakes not just on our tongues but also in a shot glass. To fill the glass we also had to scrape some snow off tree branches. Back in Laura’s room, we burned some leaves she had collected over the autumn, chewed on some stems, anointed each other with the burned leaves, melted the shot glass snow with a big purple candle, and drank a mixture of the melted snow and burned leaves. We went out onto her balcony and uttered wintertide blessings we created on the spot as we dropped a burned leaf and watched it twirl downwards.
On Christmas Eve Laura, her friends, and I hung out in their kitchen, cooking, chatting, relaxing. A bunch of her friends were vegetarians and vegans, so I had loads of meat-free food to enjoy. At night, after dinner and after a relaxing day of playing Monopoly and Jenga and reading People magazine, we went to midnight mass at some Catholic church, even though most of us were areligious. Of course I couldn’t understand a word being said (my German language knowledge extended to please, thank you, hello, blood and milk—the latter being ever so helpful), but the service was still magical.
Christmas morning brought vegan pancakes, which were followed by a walk through the forest. Well, it was supposed to be a simple walk, but it really turned into a death march of sorts after a while. Laura, bless her heart, was fit as a fiddle and had no problem bounding around the woods’ steep hills at a steady clip. I, on the other hand, was out of shape, out of breath, shivering, congested, coughing a watery cough, sore, bleeding profusely, inadequately dressed. We got lost, too, which meant our hike went on and on, world without end. I really became concerned after a while, thinking we’d never make it back to her dorm as we threaded our way through the utterly still forest. I even began crying a bit toward the end, so devoid of hope was I that we’d ever find our way home—at least before dark. After roughly eight hours of this, we finally managed to stumble back into her dorm at dusk. I was beyond exhausted and couldn’t feel my feet anymore. But I did warm up and cheer up while eating her friends’ vegetarian Christmas feast. After that I not-so-patiently waited for them to stop using the phone to talk to their families so I could talk to my own family back in States. At night we hung out and watched Father of the Bride, which was of course in German, so none of it made sense to me.
On Boxing Day Laura and I headed to Frankfurt, where we poked around the city for a bit in the snow while waiting for our flight to London (she came back with me for a week or two, and we commenced a reunion with three of our friends from home who were also visiting for a week or two). It was stupid of us to fly into London on Boxing Day, though; public transportation was nearly nonexistent, and the commute from Heathrow to my dorm—which generally only took two hours, at most—took over seven hours and required a complicated tango of maneuvering our way through the warren of the city on bus, tube, feet, and taxi.
That, in a nutshell, was my only non-family Christmas!
song heard most recently before posting: New Year’s Day/On Christmas Night—Bonnie Rideout, Maggie Sansone, Al Petteway, Eric Rigler
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