holiday feminist

After Christmas with the family I can finally breathe again.

Strange how family life wears you out. Objectively speaking, it went well. No fights, no tears from my brother's kids and the dogs didn't knock over any candles. Santa Claus politely knocked on the door early on Christmas Eve as he is supposed to do, just after dinner, and interrogated the kids about their behaviour before almost falling asleep in a chair while everybody else was handing out presents to each other. Outside, the snow was gently falling and at the end of the evening I had to dig the car out of a snow drift, shivering in my best clothes.

Subjectively, though, I felt a bit like Bridget Jones. No boyfriend this year either and it doesn't matter how many I've had through the year - at Christmas I'm still the unmarried one, the hopeless case. Doesn't matter what I have achieved either. I will count as one of the children until I'm attached to a man.

Enough to make a feminist out of anyone.

Christmas last year I spent far away from all family, in London. I have good memories of sipping wine in a warm hotel lounge, swapping gifts with my friend in our room, laughing over a very different Christmas dinner in a Lebanese fast-food diner. I also recall walking around a completely quiet, shut-down, eerily empty city on Christmas day - I don't think there are many non-Londoners (or Londoners even) who have experienced the city this way, like a ghost town. We walked for hours (since public transport was closed) into the city centre and finally found one restaurant/pub that was open. It was absolutely packed with people and we could not even get a coffee, so we gave up and walked back to the hotel. Now thoroughly fed up. Almost there, we ran into a guy carrying a take-away coffee mug and in our caffeine deficit desperation we pounced on the poor guy to ask him where he had managed to find coffee in this backward town. He pointed out a tiny coffee shop around the corner and the day was saved. Never has a coffee tasted so good.