It is the beginning of Advent and, like Hayley, I am contemplating Christmas. For the past four years or so, I have always spent Christmas with my daughter at my parents’ house. (My husband mainly doesn’t care about Christmas, rousing himself occasionally to actual dislike of it, so we’d heartlessly leave him behind to keep the cats and hens and hamsters company.)
Christmas in Belgium is slightly different from Christmas in Britain, slightly – slightly – less commercial. Belgians also put up lights and decorate trees, and their Christmas markets are famous. (Although I was most disappointed by our local market for many years, which was purportedly on a ‘Charles Dickens’ theme. Yes – had Charles Dickens been a cowboy! Unless he’s also famous for novels set in the American Wild West...)
On the 5th December Sinterklaas comes, riding a white horse across the roofs and perhaps accompanied by the controversial figure of Zwarte Piet. They have travelled to Belgium from Spain on a steamboat, and they have presents for all good children. Children put out shoes and among the presents may find pepernoten, oranges and chocolate letters. (No pepernoten in our house though as everyone hates them.)
Then on Christmas Eve, families meet to exchange gifts and eat together. (This spreads out the presents, quite an advantage.) Christmas Day is for going to Mass and having a nice dinner, although there are no traditional foods, you can eat whatever you like!
This year will be different. Belgium, having messed up in the second wave even more perhaps than it messed up in the first wave, remains under tight restrictions (today all the shops have reopened, which is good news for them but also for those of us who haven’t bought any presents yet). There are no Christmas markets, no cafés and no parties. We are allowed one visitor in the house, or a gathering of four adults outdoors, over the festive season.
This means a great deal of freedom and yet also a great deal of restriction in deciding how we will celebrate Christmas this year. I enjoy finding nice presents for people but since many of them live in the UK I have to start in good time or find myself under pressure, which takes away the pleasure. Usually I send a mixture of Christmas cards and Christmas emails to friends and family, but this year I am going to make a special effort to write more cards (also, E designed a Christmas card as part of one of those drives that schools have to raise money for themselves so I have a lot of jolly cards with a Pokémon character on them – nothing says ‘Christmas’ like a Pokémon character after all – and I need to find them homes). We’ll go to Mass and eat salmon and play boardgames.
I also want to do something a little bit special, because I think it would be a shame if we spent the rest of our lives looking back and saying, ‘Do you remember that dreary Christmas in 2020?’ And so we’re going to have fire in the garden on Christmas Eve, and invite a few family members to come and sit around it. My initial plan was a massive bonfire, with possibly some wild dancing around it. But this was not greeted with enthusiasm by the rest of the family, and since our guests will all be either under ten or driving, the bacchanalian possibilities are limited. Instead, we have a rather prim-looking brazier and I am looking for good recipes for hot chocolate. If you never hear from me again, you’ll know we managed to burn the house down anyway.
(The illustrations in this post are all Victorian Christmas cards. I found them here, except for the second and most startling one, which is from here. If you enjoy murderous frogs and children in teapots, you can find more nineteenth-century strangeness at both sites...)