zaswiec na niebie mym.
What with one thing and another going to a continental Christmas market this year hasn’t happened. To try to make up for it, we decided to go to Manchester’s ‘famous’ Christmas market, to soak up the atmosphere and to sample a bit of glühwein whilst wandering around brightly-lit stalls selling all manner of marzipan-coated goodies, where red-faced jolly Dutch people sold Christmas clogs and stout German frauleinen proffered sausages long enough to knoblauch your knackwurst.
Actually, it wasn’t that bad. By mid-afternoon the crowds were reminiscent of Köln’s horrendously overcrowded Weihnachtsmarkt as frustrated mothers pushed irritated toddlers through throngs of shopping-mad punters and light Manchester drizzle. Shopping isn’t my favourite thing, granted, but I do like to wander around a market, especially one full of interesting sounds (‘This garlic plate will save you time and energy!’), sights (man in Russian-style chapka pushing a pram straight towards the beer tent) and smells (sausages, burgers and generator diesel).
Manchester has a real snobbery, though, that masks a dark underbelly. I think this is best seen in the council’s choice of decoration for the town hall. For several years they had an inflatable Santa but, having patched and mended him, they decided this year they’d get something new. What they got is, without doubt, the most repulsive Christmas decoration I’ve seen in a long while – even worse than the gaudy red and black Christmas tree in the hairdressers on Market Street. It’s a big, fat, light-covered ‘Santa’ that looks vaguely like someone with a beard if you squint. It is foul. It is light polluting. It is as far from the true spirit of Christmas as it is possible to get. As a contrast, there is also a German decoration made of wood. Personal choice, I know, but to me the wooden decoration is so much more appealing than the light polluting Father Christmas plonked on top of the entrance to the town hall.
Watching all the shoppers pursuing the bargains made me sad. Yesterday on BBC 6 Music, one of the presenter’s sidekicks said something, hopefully tongue-in-cheek, about ‘Father Christmas’ birthday’ and, whether joking or not, made me realise how few people seem to know why we celebrate this feast. For me, the Polish way of family and meal with an exchange of token gifts is so much more appealing than the lavish shows of wealth here. As the one million Poles go back this year – some paying the extortionate prices, charged by easyJet, Wizz and the like, of up to five times the normal price – they will take a little of our commercialism back with them and slowly it will creep into what is still a simple, holy celebration of the birth of a life. I feel lucky and privileged I can celebrate the feast in this way and enjoy the experience whole-heartedly.
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