Exactly the opposite reaction to the intention of the owners who want to entice the ‘Christmas spirit’.
At best I barely tolerate supermarket music, but at this special time of the year I choose to minimise the frenzy.
At the end of spending my first year in Hong Kong I was appalled by the commercial exploitation of this season in a country where Christians were in the minority. Whole shops selling only garish Christmas decorations opened up. Cheap, soulless, mass-produced, throw-away glitz (I had not yet discovered the beautiful Balsa wood, embroidered cloth, handmade Chinese decorations in Beijing – but that’s another story…).
So disheartening was this money-induced pseudo-festive mood that we booked a trip to Zürich (where we had lived a previous year) to spend Christmas there. How utterly different and peaceful Switzerland was! Walking the streets in Meilen, after the train had deposited us, we asked ourselves incredulously: “Where are all the people?” In Hong Kong more than six-million would be cramming every street and alley.
As I stood in the queue of the bank the next day I watched the generous, white candles burning silently on the counter of each teller. A fresh twig of holly with small glistening red berries the only decoration. I sighed deeply and contentedly.
Feeding the graceful white swans, opportunistic coots and ever-present pigeons (strangely, there were no pigeons in Hong Kong, while every European city and many other towns across the world, always have flocks of them), while feasting on chocolates (bought at the world-famous Sprüngli’s), we were struck by the impact of more contrasts. Gone was the pervasive Hong Kong smell – a combination of musty humidity, congestive living and man’s inevitable waste. Instead, crisp freshness of high altitude clean air and almost sterilised clean living!
After a few days of revisiting old haunts, indulging in geschnetzeldes pouli (chicken) with rich steinpilz (mushroom) sauce and rösti, and of course Raclette cheese and catching up with the news of old friends and ex-colleagues, we longed for snow. So, we boarded a train for Salzburg, seeing also that we had not yet been to Austria. And we were welcomed with abundant, thick snow!
Gliding smoothly in our cosy train through beautiful wooded scenery to Innsbrück, where skiers disembarked with all their paraphernalia, we felt snug, recalling our own acquaintance with snow sports, two years previously (- that is yet another story…).
Waking early on our first morning under the roof of the cosy Gasthoff in the centre of the city (charmingly called Goldene Ente – Golden Duck), I carefully opened the loft window and from the roof scooped up a handful of fresh snow. My husband was not amused as I pressed my find onto his still sleep-warmed cheek!
My photos of this wonderful ‘escape’ shows me, clad in my thick, long ‘natural hair’ dark coat, cashmere head band, and fox collar (I had bought it long before the animal rights upheaval. Nothing keeps one as warm as fur…) with thick long boots in ankle deep snow. Nothing is as silent as snow. Almost as if it erases all sound. As a backdrop: cathedrals’ spires transformed into fairy tale illustrations; a bridge linked naked trees with deep footprints on pavements; graves’ stark remembrance softened as if in deep contemplation - where Mozart’s remains were unceremoniously dumped…
As much as I loathe ‘tours’, the Sound of Music Tour, with only a few of us, took us past the lake where the Von Trapp family rowed, and it did stir our imagination. But the highlight was the intimacy of the evening: in the soft glow of candles and lanterns with a few discreet street lamps bending their heavy heads under snow caps, the Christ Kindli Markt, selling simple home-crafted Christmas tree decorations of Salzteig (salt dough) and plaited grain husks, was clustered around the Town Hall. With glasses of hot aromatic glühwine we listened entranced as the low sounds of the long Alpenhorn filled the quiet night.
I thought of the song, The Sounds of Silence (Simon and Garfunkel): “narrow streets of cobblestone ‘neath the halo of a street lamp… light that split the night and touched the sound of silence…”
The Christmas spirit was palpable…
BY ADRIANA COETZEE
