In a Stable on Christmas day

In A Stable

Years ago, we used always to go away at Christmas. We had to take a break in this tradition for a number of years when we were caring for my husband Steve’s elderly mother and did so up until her death last December. Now we have restarted our preferred Christmas holiday. There are good reasons for doing this; one being that our small family antiques import/export business dies the proverbial death during December, and does not recover usually until mid January. The other reason is that we find the, spend, spend, spend and drink yourself silly at office party’s and eating fit to bust, quite distasteful.

My husband Steve, was brought up in a Catholic family, my dad played the cornet in the Salvation Army band, and my mum sang in the choir of St Peters in Brighton as a youngster, which meant that both of us were taught, and therefore do know the meaning of Christmas. And having that inbred, prefer to be away from the sort of Christmas so many people now prefer to celebrate, that seems to us to be almost pagan.

So for many years we enjoyed spending Christmas in Switzerland and although we are not a heavy duty religious pair, we prefer to enjoy a traditional celebration that does not include baubles and sparkly Santa figures climbing over balcony’s, and the strange growing habit in the UK of smothering the front of your house with gaudy lights. When I mention this, people say to me, “Well, Christmas is for the children isn’t it”. Well, no actually, in my view, it is not. Or rather it was not once upon a time. For me, and I hope still, for many others it is about the birth of Christ.

December for us is also a month of remembrance since so may of our elder family members have died around Christmas time. This is why we try to get away to a hotel or better still a small apartment where we can spend a less commercial time quietly together mixed in with some sport; swimming and walking in the picturesque mountains. Christmas in Switzerland is far more tasteful and does include the Christmas Story.

Walking in the mountains helps restore our spirits and even though we are thinking of lost loved ones we are also seeing the beauty of nature and following healthy pursuits rather than stuffing ourselves to bursting, and drinking ourselves under the table to the point where each morning comes with a hang-over rather than holiday joy.

Our plan for Christmas day this year, was to have a good swim as usual and as we do most mornings at home, we are a sporty pair. Then we took a light breakfast before setting off for a reasonably arduous hour and a half long walk up a mountain path through a wooded valley. The path eventually leads to a point 1896 metres high, where it links to a tiny railway station, a little halt on the Rhätische Bahn, where what was once the original station waiting room that has been moved to adjoin the old stables. The waiting room and the stables of long ago, stand sandwiched together. Here we had our Christmas dinner, in a tiny shed refurbished with pine panels, simple and plain as could be.

I could say that we ate bread and cheese for this meal but that would be making us sound much more pious than we actually are. Putting it in a more truthful way we wanted to make our day as far from the gluttonous feast that the main meal of December 25^th has become in these modern times, when people gathered with their families, eat so much that they cannot move for hours. We did not want to stuff ourselves with three times the food we would normally eat at a lunch or dinner. In fact at home we do only eat lunch OR dinner. Boil it all down to the fact that we are not going along with the bigger and bigger portions competition of the times. 

Our meal was in fact one of the national dishes of Switzerland and Austria, cheese fondue, the down to earth farmhouse invention where everybody digs in with a piece crusty bread stabbed on to a long fork, you then make a figure eight shape to coat the bread with the cheese mixture and by doing also keeping the hot cheese stirred. Apart from the pan of liquid cheese, it is sometimes served with little gingham lined sack of small plain boiled potatoes as an alternative to the plain bread.

By the end of our meal we were very happy that we had made that choice and full enough to be looking forward to an equally energetic walk back. The return hike was more challenging since it was by that time dark and once we had moved away from the building we had eaten in, it was totally dark. When we were in the planning stage of our Christmas outing, the moon was full, that was I think on Christmas eve so we had thought that our way would be lunar lit, a bright arch light overhead, since it was a maximum of one day past the full moon phase.

Ah! We had not taken in to our calculations that we were in a narrow valley with enormous mountains almost surrounding us. We were only saved by our foresight in that we had brought torches with us for the parts where the path led us through thick forest. So we set off jauntily with just the torchlight to try to prevent accidents, caused by tripping on a rock, of which there are many, or going off the path and getting lost. Nobody else knew where we were.

The other things that you do not think of in the light of day is that in the mountains there are a number of dangers present; Slipping in the river, stepping off a ledge, tripping and hitting your head on a rock or a tree or of course the darkness starts to seep into your imagination…. Getting attacked by a bear! All these things were possible in the darkness.

We picked the pace up a little and my husband grasped my hand so that at least if one of the above did occur we would meet that fate together.

As it happened; we did take a wrong turn along the way and did not realise this for some time because in the pitch black, the path is just a metre or so in front of you, and you cannot see the view all around for orientation as you had in daylight. We knew we had gone wrong when some way lower down the valley, we found ourselves on the wrong side of the narrow gauge railway line. Since it was an open stretch of central line between stations or crossings, it was well banked up, with almost a ditch of rocks, and then a rise up to the actual rails and the same repeated the other side before a fairly steep embankment, where with the torches both shining we could actually just see a woodland fingerpost. We were in a clearing and in the completely clear night sky, stars were now peaking out. Sirius had just climbed over the mountain tops to the right of us, was bright enough to be giving a little light and actually flashing his ‘Dog Star’ blue and white sparkling shards.

Steve stood for a few moments before stating that we would have to cross the line. There was no choice apart from trekking back to where we had obviously taken the wrong direction. My husband is not a man who turns back!

That made my little heart jump and miss a beat, but I did say that I thought we should not climb across the line and were they not electrified and anyway you’re not allowed to go across the line willy-nilly, except at the allocated crossings? He laughed loudly and said “Of course we’re ‘NOT  ALLOWED’, to cross the line, but unless you want to walk back a couple of miles when we are both tired enough already, we have no option”. He then pointed up to the overhead electric power lines as if that made it all instantly clear.

I held my position of opposition to the line crossing idea for a moment or two longer before caving. He was right about one thing; I didn’t fancy an uphill walk back to where ever we went wrong. If it was a couple of miles, then it was of course a four mile round trip. This logic was competing against that of clambering a mere fifty metres across the track.

Before I could raise any further objection, Steve was hoiking me up the bank ahead of him then he climbed up to the centre of the track and down the other side turning again to help me down the rocky slope into the indentation on the other side. From that point we had a steep-ish climb over rough terrain up to the point where the foot and mountain bike path signage was. By the time we got there I was quite out of breath. We stood in our tracks for a few minutes until our pulses got back to normal.

I did have to concede that this was the path we should have been on and that it was nobody’s fault that we had strayed, bearing in might the lack of the moonlight we had expected. The only sign of the moon rising was that on the other side of us the top of the mountain was illuminated by this time; the moon rise being a lot later than we had thought, due to being in this steep valley of huge rock walls.

We both admitted that we had the odd aches and pains as we strode with a renewed determined vigour; we just wanted to get our adventure over with and if we had to suffer a bit on the last couple of miles, so be it.

We were chatting cheerily by the last stage of our trek, encouraged by coming level with the lights of the town across the valley, where we started our outing, getting brighter and brighter all the time. We talked about our choice of how to spend this special day and the choice most of the people we knew had made. We came to the conclusion that we were most likely seriously outnumbered but who was to say which group was right and which was wrong. We are all entitled to our opinions and only not allowing people to think as they pleased was wrong if anything was.

For our part, I was recalling a passage from book I had once read that claimed that Jesuit priests’ would say “Show me the child at seven and I will show you the man”. Well. At seven, my parents were sending me to morning children’s service at the Emmanuel chapel at 9am on Sunday mornings, the main church service at St Georges Church at 11am and after lunch to Sunday school at 3pm. Our neighbour’s children were out playing in the street, looking scruffy but happy, whilst I stood in my clean and pressed, cream, old fashioned Sunday coat and hat and old but shiny shoes. Is one wrong and one right or shall we just say, “I blame the parents”.