Having spent half of the last 10 days in London with the remainder back in Bucharest, it has been something of an education to compare the atmosphere in both places and how Christmas visually appears in the two cities.
London has of course not changed too much in the last 10 years, with the lights on Oxford Street, more tasteful decorations in Chelsea and rampant commercialisation across the board with Hamleys toy shop on Regents Street bursting at the seems with shoppers desperate to pick up the latest must-have for their kids.
Romania is now catching up if indeed that is the right expression to use. When I first spent Christmas here in 1995, I saw a couple of Christmas Trees on Calea Dorobrantilor and that was about it. Now Magheru is lit up just as ostentatiously as Oxford Street. My first thought looking at the rather un-Christmaslike pink and blue lights was to rather snobbishly imagine that such an over-the-top display would have no place in London. In fact, when I first saw Regent Street, the blue, yellow and white lights seemed equally over the top and equally made no reference to Christmas itself save for a few snow flakes which is probably as close as London will get to a white Christmas that it now looks like we are going to have here in Bucharest.
The drive to commercialise Christmas in Romania seems to be running full steam ahead and I now spend more money to buy a Christmas tree here than I do in London and any holiday location or restaurant table over the festive period is now available only at London prices if you can still find a space.
After managing to secure a decent enough “Romanian” tree I discovered that for more the double the price I could have bought a Dutch Christmas tree rather than a local one. Following on from the logic that allows my gym to sell French bottled water at 500% of the price of Romanian bottle water, there appear to be people who value “foreign” Christmas trees. After spending a year living in Holland I was struck by its total lack of forest. Living here is hard not to drive anywhere North of Bucharest without coming face to face with thousands of trees. Are Romanian trees really so inferior that one has to import them? If we are talking about a Roman truck against an import I see the logic, but Dutch people exporting trees to Romania does rather seem like selling sand to the Arabs.
Whilst Bucharest certainly looks more like a city that wants to celebrate Christmas, the old Romanian traditions associated with Christmas seem to be fading away as quickly as the imported Western concepts are being adopted.
The traditional carol singers that go from house to house are now rarely seen in Bucharest and when they are it is more of a financial enterprise than the traditional singing in exchange for apples and pretzels. In the countryside you can still see them and people still go to Church on Christmas Eve, which seems to be a habit totally lost to the youth at least of Bucharest as it has in London.
Thankfully, the famous English tradition of getting blind drunk before Christmas at any available opportunity (office parties preferred) does not seem to have taken off here. Every evening I spent in London was a challenge to find a table in a restaurant not filled at 7pm with those still having lunch (of the liquid variety).
Fortunately for Romania, the countryside still maintains many of the traditions so it was with some trepidation that I had to attend the killing of the pig at my house in Oltenita earlier this week. Whilst I enjoyed the subsequent sausages and pork chops I had to draw the line at the pigskin laid before me for supper. Food and the traditions of cooking sarmale and pork and the rest do still survive in Bucharest as much as they do in the country and Romanians should count themselves lucky that they do not have the dubious tradition of eating dry bland turkey meat that us English are forced to devour every 25th December. Give me a ciorba any day.
Apart from the superior spread of food on Christmas Day itself, in Romania the tradition of sitting around eating too much and generally being lazy seems to be same in both countries unless you are the mother of the household when you seem to be expected to run around like a lunatic all day waiting on others.
Assuming the roads allow me to get out of Bucharest tomorrow in time to make it to Oltenita by the 25th I”ll be putting my feet up along with everyone else.
Enjoy the holiday and Happy Christmas to you all.