Icon: enlarge
Christmas tree
Photo: sakchai vongsasiripat / Getty Images
Hello everyone, my name is Samira and I've been celebrating Christmas for two years.
(In the chorus: "Hello Samira.") Because of my parents' American-Moroccan origins, I had simply never really been introduced to the German gift giving culture, although I was born in Bavaria and grew up with Christmas markets.
Samira El Ouassil Right Arrow
Photo: Stefan Klüter
Born in Munich in 1984, is an actress and author.
In 2016 her book "The 100 Most Important Things" (with Timon Kaleyta and Martin Schlesinger) was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
In 2009 she was candidate for chancellor of the PARTY, which at that time was not admitted to the general election.
She was recently awarded the Bert Donnepp Prize for media journalism for her media-critical column »Wochenschau« (uebermedien.de).
In the three-person household of the El Ouassils, the holidays were simulated in the best possible way out of courtesy to the local traditions, but due to a good-humored atheist suspicion, the excessive religiosity was reduced to the lowest denominator.
On that day, we mainly ate more than usual and gave each other in a rather unspectacular way things that were left over from birthdays.
The full, Christmas tree-smelling, tangled in organic tinsel substitute, wrapped with reusable golden ribbons ("Make sure there is no more banknote in the wrapping paper!") And decorated with red and white sugar-free sticks, I only got to know as an adult .
Thanks to my friend's family and all of my admirable adult friends, who have now all become independent family units celebrating Christmas, the Christian Festival has now also reached me, just like Halloween did with primary school children.
Since then I have to admit: I can win a lot of magic from the will to stage the custom.
In my field study I learned the following about the tragicomic meaning of this festival as a baptism of fire for social cohesion:
Depending on how you arranged it with the children or whether you are Catholic or Protestant, but basically it doesn't matter, either Santa Claus or the Christ Child comes on Christmas Eve.
One of the two (sometimes even both in the case of children of divorce) brings presents to celebrate the birthday of a spiritual, socially critical zombie philanthropist who was the Christ Child mentioned above as a child and is the son of a cosmological entity.
Santa Claus, meanwhile, is among other things a version of our Santa Claus, "Santa Klees", which was coming on December 6th, which was exported to the USA by the Dutch and who then came back from the USA as "Santa Claus".
(Incidentally, Coka Cola did
not
enforce that it was red.) In addition, you put a magically decorated tree in your living room, but it has nothing to do with Jesus or Santa Claus and the Catholics were so suspicious for a long time that it was in churches was forbidden.
My friend's family traditionally works with a locked Christmas tree room, which is only opened on Christmas Eve with the gentle ringing of a small bell ("the Christ Child") and then stormed, similar to an anti-terror swat team operation.
That is the contemplative part of the evening.
During my Christmas apprenticeship there was also the constant attempt to turn the generous, Christian flood of gifts into a less consumer-oriented celebration, but this failed at the beginning due to politeness.
In a multi-generational extended family, no one had the heart to leave someone unprofitable with the argument of conserving resources.
The giving has to be organized in advance with the help of lists, Excel tables and WhatsApp groups, which was very time-consuming, which is why one went over to the Secret Santa, where one now gives presents to only one person with the help of lists, anonymous lottery procedures, Excel tables and emails.
In addition to reducing gifts - and thus consumption - this change should also primarily serve to give more careful thought to how the drawn person could be given real pleasure, instead of the Schwipp-brother-in-law with a dozen uniformly bought budgets -Gifts to shower for people aged 12 to 99 who are always either an audio book or a shower sponge.
Thus, Wichteln is a cultural technique that is intended to put capitalism in its place and at the same time strengthen family relationships.
Regardless of the elf, a child apparently always receives an average of 56 gifts, and when they are opened for several hours, everyone present happily watches to take the work off the gifted child's work with enthusiasm for the gifts.
At the beginning, as a naïve Christmas beginner that I was, I felt the sometimes dramatic displeasure about alleged miscarriages as terribly ungrateful.
But perhaps one understands this frustration of happiness best with Rousseau, who wrote in the Nouvelle Héloïse: »Woe to him who has nothing more to wish for!
He loses everything he has, so to speak.
One has less enjoyment of what one demands than of what one hopes, and one is only happy before one is happy. "
Incidentally, the phrase "You won't get anything big this year" is a trap.
Strictly speaking, a test to check the Christmas will, which one can only fail.
Mydays and Jochenschweizer gifts are versions of "I give you the opportunity to become a different person" that are packaged for petrol stations.
You can be happy about it Nietzschean (I am finally allowed to become the parachute jumper sommelier that I have always been in my heart!) Or suggest playing board games out of revenge and mortification.
Board games are indispensable because board and card games are related to family quarrels like football to war.
Just as sport is a substitute for destructive conflicts between nations and diplomatic tension is channeled in a playful way, in parlor games you can shout at each other lovingly - YOU'RE NOT YET YOURSELF, YOU HAVE THROWED A FOUR AND PULLED THE ASH PUTTLE SHOE, A VIIIIIIER AND THE SCHUUUUH, GUCK INTO THE MANUAL - without having to divorce or disinherit afterwards.
Now I understand why board games are called that - because without them society would be inconceivable.
The clean-up catharsis of flying game pieces replaces any family constellation.
In contrast to parlor games, family table discussions should never serve to resolve issues, but always serve to manage amazement about the world in solidarity.
The percentage of the smartphone battery at the end of the day proves to be a reliable indicator of harmony.
In order to smooth out tensions such as bumps in the carpet, conflicts and frictions from holiday diplomacy are swept right under these and somehow everyone comes to terms with it every year.
As philosophy professor Stéphane Floccari analyzes in his book “Surviving Christmas”, there is not only a discomfort with regard to the festival caricatured in a number of Christmas films, but also a gratefully accepted, almost desired repression that “under the tremendous social, cultural and historical Apparat is lurking «, which we call Christmas and which we want to and have to face every year.
(But I'm incredibly lucky, the battery is always around 87% on the night of the 24th.)
So what the finding and celebrating one's own traditions and family rituals both on a small scale and historically on a large scale illustrates: Christmas is next to the cheerful ceremonial kitsch, the staged religious performance and the unrestrained hedonism offers a projection surface for the existential fears that one on the darkest day of the Year can have: cold, gloom and loneliness.
Celebrating such a night is also a metaphor filled with festive meals for overcoming this sunless time together.
And that's presumably also the meaning of this festivity, in the calendar synchronized kinship affection and attention, in order to then actually inadvertently experience real kinship affection and attention.
In this sense, however, it is not even the much-cited "Family Festival", but above all the celebration of the search for security.
The almost tribal, shared joy of the return of light and warmth makes this pagan Advent chimera, this patchwork of folklore, religious politics and sales incentives, despite or precisely because of it, the festival of festivals - we celebrate it together.
What I have now understood in my Christmas internship: “As a symbolic ceremony of confidence, whether in person or digitally, maybe right now, exactly this year, it is the perfect celebration to end 2020.
Merry Christmas!"
