They do the St. Nicholas thing here on December 6th, so they start in on the holiday happenings pretty early (but not TOO early—there’s an official start date, and some retailer got in trouble for jumping the gun this past year) and everything emerges fully realized rather than crescendoing up to a frenzy. The lights and decorations and market were installed by the 1st, so the next day we went downtown to check things out. We encountered the following:

- Booths selling everything from churros to handmade jewelry to cell phones
- A section of the market devoted to the 2011 cultural capital of Europe, Tallinn, complete with Estonian mulled wine, Estonian gifts, and an Estonian brass band playing carols
- Ice skating rink, Ferris wheel (a view overlooking the rink at left), two carousels and an inflatable, monster-shaped house of horrors where you entered through the mouth and exited near where you’d expect to find the cloaca
- Nativity scene with live animals and fake people
- Light show on the Grand Place that projected “snow” onto the buildings using mirror balls while simultaneously changing the color of the buildings’ faces
- Mannekin Pis dressed as Pere Noel
- Young Americans wherever we turned

There was also a parade of people in green windbreakers through town, which at first we thought was the Santa Claus parade that had been scheduled for the previous day. The large number of police cars and the armored police vehicle parked nearby told a different story, though, and we figured out that it had something to do with the closure of the local VW plant that had been announced. (Under intense pressure, they backed off the closure later.)

As we ate rather divine Vietnamese food for lunch, we watched a guy across the street painting the long stretch of plate-glass windows of an Irish bar with holiday words and images, and each time I glanced over he had done all his detailed artistry in one color and was on to the next. Before we knew it, he was gone. Man, did he work fast.

Another festive event was the holiday party given by Jack’s Finnish coworker, featuring mulled wine with almonds and raisins steeped in it and a variety of traditional and non-traditional sweets. People were strangely interested in what we had done for Thanksgiving--I have no idea what holidays are celebrated in other countries, so it was odd that they knew about this one. There was an Actual Belgian at this party, so I took the opportunity to ask about the holidays, and he said that December 6th was for kids, so I guess the more general celebration is on Christmas.

Not so enjoyable were the crowds in the stores. We did our best to stay in the small, homegrown shops, but unfortunately that’s where everyone else wanted to be, too. As holiday shopping usually makes me hate everything, I think I did a pretty good job of maintaining a positive attitude. It didn’t hurt that my family changed their gift giving scheme this year to something a bit more manageable. The only item that I regret not snapping up was a set of nesting dolls featuring Vladimir Putin, which I spotted at a Ukrainian and/or Russian general store. When I decided to go back and get it a few days later, it was gone. I got a bottle of vodka shaped like Attilla the Hun (or somebody) instead.

Jack participated in a teambuilding thing for work one night that involved wine tasting and preparing Thai food. The idea was to pit two teams against one another and see which was the best at doing the assigned tasks. Jack felt it was unstructured and chaotic, and he didn’t learn much about either cooking or wine, although he did get to brown some chicken pieces and chop onions. The other team, somewhat arbitrarily, won the competition. This cooking school has a huge storefront on a major thoroughfare in our area, and I think it’s only a matter of time before they go belly up if his experience is at all representative of how they do business.