Me in the Alps in Winter 2015

Me in the Alps in Winter 2015
Not Just Surviving, But Thriving!

Thursday, December 25, 2014

The Holiday Cheer and the Holiday Ache



We are having a very low key Xmas Day, recovering from a long and involved and wonderful and delicious Christmas Eve Dinner, the big event here, cooked for us in 7 courses by very generous German friends. Along with a different alcohol for every course — whew! A true feast. I am exhausted and all I did was eat and drink and talk (but in my defense, much of the chat was in German which I do struggle to participate in).
    The Christkind, or Christ child, comes here with presents on Xmas Eve — Xmas itself is not a big day, I haven't even heard any church bells, altho it could be because the temperature just dropped (from way too high for the season) and the windows are tightly closed. The bells were thundering last night during dinner at our friend's apartment, at 6ish and then again at 10ish and then at midnight: they live around the corner from a very large church tower which is still rung by hand by extremely enthusiastic bellringers. The church, Catholic as most of them are here, is St. Maximilians and it overlooks the River Isar, and is transcendently beautiful in the fog.
Yes there is snow at Garmisch-Partenkirchen

   I miss our son more than I can say: this is possibly the unsurmountable ache that will end up making us move back (if he doesn't meet and marry a nice German girl and stay here). He's flying here on 8 Jan, and we're counting down the days! John is excited to take him out for a spin in some new BMW i3 Electric Hybrid they're working on (I think that's what it is, I forget exactly), and we'll definitely get up to Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the Carvendel mountain range so he can go snowboarding. If there's snow!
    We have a mini Cooper to drive for a week while his company is closed, so we might zip over to Austria or Freiburg, or even Italy, although it's looking like snow everywhere and we're not enthusiastic about being stuck in massive traffic backups in the snow in a mini, so...maybe we'll just hole up in the apartment. There's 20 times the number of people here than in Oregon, and that does not make for spontaneous, carefree driving, so we've hardly ever driven. 
    It turns out Munich is a wonderful place to be in the month of December! As long as you're okay with being out in the cold. Everything is lit up like crazy, lights everywhere, even on the construction cranes, but particularly beautiful in the city center. And Weihnachtsmarkts everywhere, large and small, traditional and a little wilder (artsy in the historically art neighborhoods, naughty in the gay neighborhood), even a Medieval version in the Residenz.
    Because it's so beautiful it's not that hard to work the Step 8 I use:


We became willing to attempt to unconditionally love the ways of this culture so different from the one we were raised in, but one in which we respectfully seek a home, while continuing to honor the ways of our birth country.

   On a good day, it's the most beautiful December I've ever experienced. On a bad day, I still wonder what we were thinking...

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