Good Or Shit: A Grim Berlin Christmas

It was a few weeks before Christmas, and all through Berlin, it was minus two degrees, it was bloody cold as sin.

People in London always ask me what Christmas is like in Australia. How can you have Christmas when it’s hot? I mean, do you still have roasts and hot food or do you just throw a shrimp on the barby?

What kind of decorations do you have? Do you still dust snow on things? Does Santa drive a sled? I mean, in that suit, the sweat!

It’s true. We still have all these things in the sweltering southern hemisphere. Santas in ridiculous attire for the weather, reindeer pulling sleds on snow-free roofs, halls decked with boughs of holly – a bush I’d never even seen grow in real life until I moved to the northern side of the globe.

Berlin in winter is grim. It doesn’t get light until 8am and it gets dark again at around 4pm.

The freezing streets are quiet, almost deserted. Even in the tourist hot spots.

A friend told me I would have to wait four hours to see the Ishtar Gate – the great entryway to the Ancient city of Babylon that’s been reconstructed inside the Pergamon Museum. Not only did we just walk right in, we pretty much had the whole museum to ourselves.

Heavy grey clouds hang low in the sky all day, the trees are bare, and a kind of vapour lightly clouds everything. Not thick enough to be called fog, but just enough to make to all so ghostly.

And then, just when the cold has cut through seven layers of clothing, your exposed face is burning, and you can no longer feel your legs, you see it, in the distance. The twinkling of lights, the smell of hot cabbage and potato fritters, the music on the icy wind, and you know you’ve stumbled upon a Christmas market.

Wtf is a Christmas market?, those who have not had the good fortune to experience one ask. Well gather round all yea who would hear of this magical wonderland to be found in most European cities.

They begin on the first day you’re allowed to take a chocolate out of your Advent calendar. Little villages that crop up throughout the city, made up of sweet wooden huts decorated with lights and baubles and boughs of pine, with enormous Christmas trees towering over their soon to be snow covered roofs. They have ice skating rinks and hot food, sweets and deserts, bars selling steaming hot alcohol, and an endless range of handcrafted wares.

This is where all the people in this seemingly empty city seem to be gathered. In these bustling, atmospheric, cheerful markets, of which Berlin has sixty.

"The twinkling of lights, the smell of hot cabbage and potato fritters, the music on the icy wind, and you know you’ve stumbled upon a Christmas market."

This is where joy is made.

While London has its own version, Londoners frequently jump a plane or a Eurostar and head off to Poland, or France, or Prague, for a weekend wondering around Christmas markets.

I’d mentioned it to my friend – who’d flown all the way from Sydney – with some excitement.

“We’re going to drink so much mulled wine!” I squealed.

She squealed back – “What’s mulled mine?”

Hot red wine, spiced with cinnamon and cloves, and all things nice. It’s the elixir of life in a cold climate. A northern barometer. When the vat appears on the bar in your local pub you know that winter is coming.

We stood in front of one of many market bars reading the German signs and trying to work out which was the mulled wine.

“Gluhwein?”

“Must be.”

“Zwei Gluhwein.” She says, having a go at the language. The lady in the hut smiles, “Six Euros thanks.”

After a few cups, standing by a fire, the wine warming the coldest corner of our souls, the glee kicks in – stuff the Guggenheim! We cheer, We came for the Glühwein!

Arm in arm we wander the stalls, making lists of all the food we want to try, and giggling as we start adding chiselled German men.

Four days I was there, and every day we ended up in a Christmas market.

“Only 58 more to go,” my friend says, on day two, grinning like a child.

“Christmas makes everything warm!” I exclaim, with jubilation, as the night wears on and the temperature plummets.

“Is there anything better than a Christmas market!”

“We’re drunk on Christmas!”

It was bewitching. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that much Christmas spirit my entire life.

“That sounds so much better than spending Christmas in the heat, at the beach.” A friend said to me, when I called Australia to extol the virtues of the European Christmas market.

But is it better? Or just different?

Thinking about Australian Christmas traditions, I must admit, it is a bit odd that Santa doesn’t have a change of clothes in that sack for when he slips across the equator.

All very European wintery Christmas-style things we try to implement in our own country kind of show that we’re a bit of a culturally confused nation; desperately clinging to some psychological vision of ourselves as being European, while emulating everything that is American, and then claiming proudly to be Australian.

But we are an immigration nation, so part of who we are is tied up in the traditions our migrant parents and grandparents, or spouses, or friends who have grown up in other places want to continue in some way.

My family celebrates Christmas like the cultural hybrids we are. A display of former Austro-Hungarian fare along with prawns and yabbies and ice cold wine and beer. Sure it might be too hot for all that roast meat, but you just have to turn the aircon up.

In a way, I think Australia’s schizophrenic traditions are part of its charm. Although I might tell my own kids that Santa parks his sled in the Northern Territory, harnesses his magic silver brumbies, and takes off in his flying Cobb and Co coach.

Because, while I enjoy to the novelty of the cold Christmas, give me one among the gum trees, in the stinking heat, with an esky at my feet.