Christmas Time

Two thousand years after the birth of Christ, the Greeks have discovered Christmas. Oh, sure, they've always had the religious holiday, but in the Orthodox calendar it ranks some way below Easter, and the general feasting and jollity that go with it are much more low-key. Preveza may get bloody cold, but winter in Greece doesn't have that feeling of frozen, dark endlessness that you get in northern climes, so I suppose the winter solstice, Yuletide and all that never had the same importance. Obviously I haven't actually done a comparative study of ancient pagan holidays, but this seems a reasonable theory to me.

Tradition, Christian or pre-Christian, is no match for global capitalism, however. Christmas as the Feast of Consumerism is taking off big time now. This is, I think, a new development: four years ago, when I lived in Thessaloniki, things were very different. There were a few Christmas trees, some municipal decorations - boats seemed to be a popular motif -, the occasional apartment with lights around the window, a sprinkling of tinsel in the larger shops: that was about it.

Here, this year, you'd think they'd just invented electricity. Every lamppost, every balcony, every window twinkles with coloured light-bulbs. Sometimes, as in the strings of lights hung along the seafront promenade, it's beautiful: in other places, it's an epileptic's nightmare. We've succumbed ourselves and bought - for one euro - a set of 100 miniature music lights: "Bulbs twinkle with every note magically!" Obviously, since we have no desire to drive ourselves insane within 24 hours, we've switched the "music device" to off. Others, crazier, or deafer, haven't: the house across the street beeps an unending chorus of infuriating Christmas songs. To make matters worse, they've been abridged, so that if they were sung, rather than beeped, the sequence would go something like this:

We wish you a merry Christmas we wish you a merry and a happy new year jingle bells jingle bells jingle all the way fun is to ride on a one horse open sleigh biddle bee beep biddle bee beep [can't identify this bit: it sounds similar to The Sans Day Carol, but this seem unlikely] Santa Claus is coming to town we wish you a merry...

Santa Claus has indeed come to town: a disturbingly fat specimen swings his hips to "Jingle Bell Rock" - over and over andoverandover - outside one of the shops in the bazaar. There's another parachuting down the side of Rachel's school. Few chimneys here - not sure how the bloke gets into the apartments.

Along the high street, speakers attached to lampposts play carols or Christmas songs, mostly American. The closest to anything Greek is, I suppose, George Michael singing "Last Christmas". Meanwhile, the shops are full of more kitsch ornaments than you can shake a fairy wand at, and the TV seems to show nothing but adverts for children's toys (usually, the TV merely shows nothing but adverts, with occasional brief movie breaks. It makes you long for the BBC, or even ITV.) The PlayMobil castle, I have to admit, looks pretty fantastic.

Surely there must be some Greeks, besides the November 17th terrorists, who resent having this festival of consumption, with all its foreign trappings, thrust upon them: for the most part, though, people seem to be embracing it like a drunken snog under the mistletoe at the end of the office party - with about as much regard for good taste. They'll probably regret it in the morning.

As for indigenous Greek Christmas traditions: they do lovely honey and nut cookies. There are fresh satsumas and walnuts. And there's also the mandatory 10% seasonal bonus most taxi drivers and tavernas add to your bill.

Despite all this, I don't feel very Christmassy myself. (I was expecting a red squiggly line under "Christmassy", but no, apparently the folks at Microsoft understand the concept.) Contrast with last year, when we were in Nuremberg at this time. The Germans do Christmas brilliantly - the Christkindsmarkt, Gluhwein, Lebkucken, freezing bleakmidwinter weather, snow on steep roofs, frozen canals and Tannenbaume and "Stille Nacht" and a good old fashioned St Nicholas who hasn't yet fully mutated into the Coca Cola version... Now, that's Christmas...

I haven't seen many turkeys in Greece, but Rachel's boss keeps ostritches.