2. Weihnachtstag

In which I went to church (church on the 26th? Yes! Because it's St. Stephen's day, of course. What better way to feel the Christmas joy than to contemplate the death of the first Christian martyr?), had a drink with a friend, and spent an inordinate amount of time scrolling through Facebook. Dan made fondue for dinner. Fondue is delicious.

Sugar detox, starting tomorrow. Screen detox might not be such a bad idea either, so it might be a bit before I post again. Or not. Not sure. Yay for chronic uncertainty!

1. Weihnachtstag

Merry Christmas?

I don't have any pictures of my kids joyfully opening their presents because I believe that some moments are best enjoyed without the threat of photography, but some joyful opening of presents did indeed happen this morning. Then we had a nice breakfast, hung around the house, had a nice lunch, took a little walk (all of us, that is, except The Amazing Caroline, who was super excited to go work in the stall for four hours(?!)), had a nice dinner, hung around some more, and had dessert. Christmas success. I won't be able to fit into my jeans after a few more days of this, but that's a problem for January.

After all the frenzied preparations and three services at church yesterday (my mousy performance was a success, by all accounts?), this feels like a letdown. In a good way - I'm looking forward to some more days of not doing much - but it seems like...well the story is that we wait in the dark and then the light enters the world and BIG PARTY! But it's more like December is a blur of this project and that special event and do I have gifts for everyone? and the stores are going to be closed for the 25th and 26th, do I have enough food in the house? and then we sing Silent Night Stille Nacht at church and then BIG NAP! Not judging, just observing.

I still feel tired and disconnected, and last night when I finally made it to Midnight-Mass-at-10:30 (in which I had no special role; The Amazing Caroline was an altar server) I had a minor crisis because I couldn't figure out where in the church to sit. Which is as ridiculous and petty as it sounds, particularly as I'm alone nearly every time I go to church, but there you go. It was a crisis of shoulds, I guess. After nearly nine years here I *should* know and like at least one person attending the Christmas service well enough that it would not be weird for me to go over and sit by them... After putting in my time at the two kids' services today I *should* be playing some kind of role in the grownup one... I don't even know. I ended up sitting at the back with a nice man I know a little bit, feeling both relieved (to not be sitting all alone) and kind of guilty (because he always sits alone and I was undoubtedly invading his personal space). You do have a family, Susannah, why are you not with them?

Um, yeah, good question, don't have a good answer.

From the walk this afternoon, here's a picture of my friend Mike's church, with his sweet Christmas tree and advent wreath and colorful egg cross. (Is it supposed to be an egg? I don't know. But I love it.)

My Christmas this year: festive, but a bit lonely.

birthday

So thirteen years ago, this happened. My perfectly beautiful, stunning, brilliant, independent, emotionally exhausting daughter entered the world. Honestly, if I had the thing to do over again, I wouldn't subject her to any of it. But here we are, stumbling onward as best we can.

short

Evidence:

Progress has been made on the tree (photo credit: Dan and his phone)

and the Christmas altar. That is a nativity tissue, because Christopher didn't know where I'd put the drawing paper.

And look, we have friends! Yes, it's legal to take kids to bars here. Nobody got drunk.

Not pictured: cookies. But I did make them.

cleaner

Today was cleaning day, and I cleaned many (though by far not all) things. The apartment looks better. Dan bought a tree. The kids are planning to commence bickering about the ornaments first thing tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow, baking. I want to make chocolate chip cookies to give out as gifts and raspberry delights (like these, something my mom always makes) to devour ourselves.

I feel like I'm going through the motions here.

Meanwhile, the rest of Zurich is just bursting with holiday ambiance: Salvation Army music groups, other random musicians and carolers, lights, Christmas markets, the smell of Glühwein and/or fondue everywhere you go. Tonight I dragged Christopher to the Service of Lessons and Carols at the Anglican church. It was fun to sing but lonely because I didn't know a soul. I miss you, Greg!! Afterwards we had dinner at my favorite fast-food pasta place, and then we walked across to the Christmas market by Fraumünster because I wanted to see the mirrored nativity scene there. For some reason they were projecting children's drawings (?) onto the tower of St. Peter's church. I couldn't get my phone to capture this well, but it added to the general magical atmosphere.

Here's the tragedy of the whole thing, though: all the Christmas markets close on December 24. So as soon as Christmas comes, it's all over, back to just regular-charming here in the city of the money gnomes.

In the mirrored nativity scene, Mary and Joseph appear to be in love. Which is different and cool. A couple more pictures here.

Here's one of the pictures on St. Peter's. Neat huh?

Oh and did I mention Lichterschwimmen on Thursday night? Like I said, bursting.

food

Today I came up with a possible redemption plan for my brain-deadedness on Fridays. It worked once, anyway...

Procedure: Give in and be brain-dead from the end of playgroup until Dan gets home. Make some vague attempts at entertaining Christopher, then give up and watch videos with him. For dinner, feed the kids whatever you can dig up. When Dan gets home, let him take over the half-hearted parenting, and retreat to the kitchen to cook.

Results: Christopher ate eight mini-pizzas and a butterbrezel for dinner. Caroline had a packet of ramen. But then I managed to

• cook one bag of spinach (for inclusion in casserole later but mostly so it doesn't take up half a shelf in our adorable Euro-fridge),
• boil one kilo of potatoes (to be enjoyed with my find from the grocery store yesterday: bacon raclette cheese (!))
• make a very decent leek-and-gruyère quiche (tart, whatever), and
• dispatch a turnip, a rutabaga, three parsnips, six carrots, some celery that's been lurking in the fridge, and the remainder of a jar of tomato sauce into a slow-cooker stew.

After the kids were in bed, Dan browned some meat for the stew, then I did all the dishes.

Discussion: Productivity, yay! Now we have a couple of meals on hand so that I can concentrate on cleaning the apartment tomorrow and maybe we can finally get a Christmas tree. And from the veg box this week I only still have to deal with a squash, a pound of carrots, a head of some green curly stuff, and two beets.

Conclusion: Worth trying again.

very not done

And hello again. I got my things written - or in the case of the preschool service, at least drafted. So I'm allowed to write here again. I'm sure you're relieved.

Meanwhile my partner is tooooooo freaking good at her job and we have 42 adults and 22 babies registered for this Baptism of our Lord service on January 12, and that's not counting the families who normally come to our service and don't register, so we're looking at, oh, five times more people than we normally have? What does a church service for babies even look like? At some point it seems like we should wave the flag of surrender and maybe someone with some sort of training in theology or pedagogy or something should go ahead and jump in here? Except it's already too late for that. Eeeek!

And speaking of eek, yesterday at work the man who is running the preschool service on Christmas Eve sent us his script and surprise, I get to play the mouse! Who is somehow a main character in this particular Christmas story? So now I have lines to memorize, on top of the 50 Christmas jobs I have not done. No, we still don't have a tree, and also the floors are gross.

In other news: in math class, Caroline learned to calculate the angle between the two hands on a clock at any given time, taking into account that the minute hand moves 6 degrees per minute and the hour hand moves 0.5 degrees per minute. I mean, this isn't particularly hard or anything, but did *you* learn this at school? I feel like this will really prepare her for her future career as a Swiss watchmaker.

I'll leave you with a billboard of a moose cookie warming his hindquarters in a Christmas cappuccino.

'Tis the season.

singing (2)

Against the protests of the squirrely kids, we went out today. And it was good. First, we visited some American friends who live downtown, went to a waffle-and-smoothie shop near their place for brunch, and played a board game together. Then we picked up some bratwurst at the nearby Christmas market, took the train to Winterthur, visited another Christmas market, and were lured by signs and curiosity to an off-lot book sale in a gymnasium. That sucked us all in so thoroughly that we ended up being five minutes late to the thing we'd actually made the trip to Winterthur for, a service of Christmas songs (first time for us but apparently an annual event for a group of English-speaking Protestants in the greater west-Switzerland area) followed by Christmas goodies. It was definitely an older crowd and decidedly British, but I had fun singing, and the kids survived the experience.

Then we went out for burgers.

I do wonder what will become of my kids. They get a lot of exposure to the Swiss ideal, which is about strong ties to your family and loyalty to your clan and learning to do everything The One Right Way...and then there's our American household, where family is the not-always-compatible group of the four of us and we make everything up on the fly. One day they're going to have Swiss partners and I'm going to be the slovenly mother-in-law who doesn't keep a proper house.

It's the nature vs. nurture of parenting: is it my job to help my kids become the people they were born to be, or is it my job to shape them into the people they should become?

And my thing about forgiveness vs. redemption: is my inability to give my kids roots a failing I have to be ashamed of and try to fix, or is it at all possible that in their rootless childhoods they'll find the tools to be more open-minded, flexible adults?

It's both, of course. Always both.

 

Before and after waffle. He doesn't seem to be suffering too much...

Important Notice: I have to cut myself off from blog writing until I finish writing (1) the kids' service for January 12, which was supposed to be done an embarrassingly long time ago and (2) my entry for the Zurich Google Spouses Advent calendar on December 18 (?!). See you on Thursday at the latest, if all goes well.

singing

The kids are acting needy and squirrely (full moon? Christmas coming?), we do not have a Christmas tree yet, we have not fetched the box of decorations from the basement, we have not made any Christmas cookies. But Christmas songs I can manage.

Remember O Thou Man (Nathan Clark George) 
I think this was in my most-loved-YouTube-videos a few weeks ago. I do not get tired of it. This is the part I love: "Remember, o thou man, how I came to thee then, and I did what I can." Forget the all-powerful God of the Universe, this guy's just trying to make some progress like the rest of us.

Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow (Elizabeth Mitchell) 
"Leave your sheep and leave your lambs" ...such a classic call to vocation.

The Huron Carol (Crash Test Dummies) 
Yes I know I was just talking about how I'm dubious of missionaries and also I know that "Gitchi Manitou" is ignorant if not straight-up racist. But the moon of wintertime when all the birds have fled! And the tacit admission that the Christmas story is, first and foremost, a story, for telling and re-telling and adapting and embellishing...this I love.

The Cherry Tree Carol (Sting) 
I've talked about this one before too. Yay for the humanity of Joseph and yay for the imagination behind this story.

On a non-musical note, this is also wonderful. I mean it's horrible and tragic and heartbreaking, but what a moving and appropriate use of a Christian church's public platform.
https://claremontography.wordpress.com/2019/12/12/claremont-methodist-nativity/

a short story

Yesterday after I sent off my crazy post, I took a shower, rushed around getting packed up, met Christopher at school and took him to his recorder lessons, hurried with him from there to church, spent three hours monitoring the crafts and play room during the Christmas charity toy exchange, hurried with Christopher from there to parcours class, went back to church to make sure everything was cleaned up, picked him up, and eventually made it home for ramen night, cold and dripping wet and with quite a grumpy child. When the kids were finally in bed and it was time to sit down again, I couldn't for the life of me remember what had been so important in the morning that I didn't get up to take a shower until 11:00. I'm not even willing to look right now.

And this morning at therapy I was trying to capture the feeling I've had lately of waking up every morning and thinking ok...what day is it, and who do I have to be today?? And how that's, like, the opposite of what I'm aiming for, which is just being one person all the time? And how this might have to do with...something like, a midlife crisis in which the private part of myself (which I've kept carefully sealed off, maybe because the social contract of my childhood was "you can be anything you want in private as long as you meet expectations in public"?) is finally getting fed up and demanding visibility and recognition? It's all very slippery.

Anyway perhaps enough of the deep thoughts. Here I am taking liberties with my free time again, when I really should be reading for class tonight (well...ahem...reading for class last week...). So onwards.

After therapy I had the feeling that I didn't want to do my normal processing-of-thoughts in the Migros restaurant with a decaf coffee, so I got on the tram going the other direction, and then I thought ooh, what I really want to do is have a hot chocolate at the national museum café, but it doesn't open until 10, if only there was an inside place I could hang out for 20 minutes, oh the train station has a waiting room I'll try that...

Boy did that pay off.

(1) In the Zurich main station waiting room there is a short story dispenser! Free! You press a button - English, French, or German - and there are some zzzt zzzt zzzt printing sounds, and then it spits out a little 2-inch long receipt, and when you pull on the receipt (and not before - this is such a brilliant touch!), the rest of the story spews out of the machine and you're suddenly holding this three-foot-long thermal print of a short story in your chosen language.

(2) And going to the waiting room reminded me that I've been meaning to visit the chapel at the station, which is conveniently right next door, because they have a nativity scene carved out of the ruins of Auschwitz. Which was worth seeing. I wasn't bold enough to take pictures with people there praying but there are two good ones here and you can download an information sheet (only in German, unfortunately) here.

(3) And then I did go to the Landesmuseum cafe and the hot chocolate (with accompanying short story) was delicious.

Recipe for a cool morning, step 1: locate train station waiting room.

Step 2: press to dispense story.

Step 3: Order hot chocolate and cheese quiche (Chäschüechli) and note that the cash register is also utterly baffled by Swiss German.

Step 4: enjoy the deliciousness (somehow only 10 Francs, which is super affordable for Zurich?)...

Step 5: ...and read your free story!

Step 6 (optional): Go back to press the button again (because you can) and notice that the photo booth company has branched out into fresh orange juice machines. Vending machine innovation FTW!