7. Christmas
The tenseness is due to the fact that every German person must take the train “home” to visit their families. Unfortunately, these people tend to live in the most boring, remote, rural small towns in South-Western Germany. One good rule of thumb is - the more artiste, urbane, and bohemian a German person appears, the more remote and redneck his family background will be. For example, all those cross-dressing, Ketamine-addicted, full-body tattooed gay skinhead minimal-techno deejays (so, roughly 20% of the population of Berlin), stem from this place.
Back home, they will go through three days of hell, being asked to do outrageously non-hip things like eating meat, watching the Christmas drama series on TV, using non-Apple computers, or even going to church. The only thing that makes them endure all this is because none of their friends back wherever hip place they live now can see them, plus they will be able to participate in a lot of snarky conversation of how “uncool” Christmas at home was this year again. If you happen to talk to a German person after their return, you should only say things like “Man, I feel your pain. Luckily, my family didn’t expect me to go all the way home this time so I had a really chill X-Mas this year”, to which the German person then will congratulate you and say how much he envies you.
It is commendable to not ask too many questions, as your German acquaintances will still be annoyed and self-aware by all the questions they got asked back home by their hick family. Here is an imaginary sample conversation between your German acquaintance, named “Luzie”, and her father. (If you wonder why her father calls her “Tanja”, that’s because it is her real name. Luzie just sounds more bohemian and special):
Father: Tanja, how is art school going lately?
Luzie: Um well, I kind of stopped going because I started a new project together with a few good friends from (Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne).
Father: WHAT? You stopped? You already spent 10 years in university…you still want to become a (teacher, social worker, graphics designer, exhibition manager), don’t you?
Luzie: That’s not how it works in (Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne), you see, you don’t have a clue. Once our project is running, I will finish art school.
Father: What is this project anyway?
Luzie: We are opening a guerrilla store where we sell our own DIY clothing cline and host exhibitions of local artists.
Father: Okay Tanja, if you are doing so great I guess I can stop paying for your apartment in (Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne) unless you go back and finish university!
Because of the unbearable stress this “festivity gap” generates for Germans, some have chosen to break the bonds to their families and “stay around town” during the holidays. As Germans are not allowed to just be ambigous towards Christmas, they need to come up with an “alternative version”. So, they will be spending the days leading up to Christmas eve protesting against consumerism, using their illegally downloaded copy of Adobe CS4 to design anti-consumerist flyers which they will then deal out in shopping malls or department stores, often in form of a “flash-mob”, while twittering about “the experience” on their iPhones.
Tired and exhausted of this protesting labor, they finally all come together on Christmas eve in a hip Cafe or Bar where they continue their “alternative Christmas” by imitating some of the traditions like doing a “secret Santa” with self-made presents, drinking egg nog cocktails, or wearing a Santa hat and a “Christmas sweater” in an ironic way. Sometimes, the bar owner even puts up an ironic, decorated Christmas tree. To a non-German person, this might look like they are actually enjoying a boring, square Christmas party, so to dissolute this image, German people will play loud indie music instead of Christmas songs, get really drunk and depressed later in the evening, and finally end up erasing all that evil Christmas stuff from their brains at a club where minimal techno music is “spun”.
