Seeking Traditions

Nobody in Dubai could give a rat’s ass about how I was going to celebrate Christmas. Though the majority religion is Islam, Dubai obsesses about doing everything bigger and better than anywhere else and everywhere around the city was done up with lights and decorations to draw out the spirit of the holiday season – although it is difficult to know whether all that decoration was specifically for Christmas, or just Dubai being Dubai. There is no holiday that has been usurped by consumerism and capitalist interests quite like Christmas and Dubai is a place as primed as any to capitalize on the gift-giving season. Any day of the year is a fine time to do someone I care about a good turn, so reserving it for one day out the 365 has always seemed rather stupid to me. The songs are hokey, the decorations are tacky, pine trees leave a mess, obligatory church services are dull, buying gifts for everyone is stressful and expensive, and so a lot of things about Christmas I rebelled against even at a young age. However, Christmas is a time to spend with family, and though I have not started a family of my own and have spent my share of Christmases far from home and those I love, I still do what I can to observe certain traditions that were part of my own childhood. There are two traditions that over the years I have kept sacred and no matter where I end up I pull out all of the stops to make them happen. 

The Movie 

My father was a devout atheist, but my mother took the reins and raised my brother and me as Catholics. Though we were born and raised in Canada we grew up with many Hungarian traditions and one of them was how we celebrated Christmas. Hungarian Christmas traditions are a bit older than the coca-cola version celebrated in North America today and, instead, are modelled after the German tradition which has its own roots deep within other European Christian traditions.

Santa Claus[i] is really supposed to arrive on the morning of the 6th of December (not the 25th as is commonly celebrated) because that is his Saint’s day and, in fact, much of the modern ideas of Santa Claus come from the Dutch Sinterklaas which arrived in the Americas in 17th century via New Amsterdam[ii]. My friends on the playground seemed totally clueless when I told them how St. Nick brought me chocolates and candy overnight leaving the treats in my shoes that I had left by the door of my room before going to bed. Only good boys and girls got chocolates and candy from St. Nick and the naughty ones would get a lump of coal. Or, as my parents would receive during the night just to drive home the point that my brother and I had been good that year, root vegetables. In North America, they have taken this visit of St. Nick and sandwiched it together with the pagan tradition of the rising of the sun god that happens between the night of the 24th and the morning of the 25th. For us as Catholics, our big event celebrated the coming of the angel on the evening of the 24th in observance of the magi who brought gifts to the baby Jesus. 

Though the feast of St. Nicholas was a bit of a primer, nothing really Christmassy happened in our house prior to the actual day. There was no trimming the tree and, as a very young child, the tree and the gifts and the festivities seemed to happen suddenly and almost without any warning. In order to preserve our childlike sense of wonder a lot of work happened behind the scenes unbeknownst to my brother and I. My father would go to the cinema once a year, every December 24th,  where he would accompany my brother and me to whatever age-appropriate film[iii] he had an outside chance of enjoying. But it was all part of an elaborate ruse. While we were out, my mother and grandparents would be working furiously to set up and decorate the tree, wrapping gifts, and preparing the evening meal. After the movie, we would get courted off to a catholic mass for kids and by the time we’d get home it would be just about supper time and the whole house would be aglow with the shimmer of soft blue Christmas lights and tinsel. Everyone will argue that they had the most beautiful Christmas tree growing up, but, with no word of a lie, when you have gone the whole year without so much as seeing even a single twinkling light and then suddenly it all bursts through the windows of your home from the darkest part of the night, reflecting off the snow, and feeling the cold winter on your nose, it is enough to take your breath away. I cannot imagine a lit Christmas tree having quite the same awe-inspiring effect with its light diluted by the morning sun.

As I grew up and pulled back the curtain on all of the supposed miracles, it was those visits to the cinema that grew the deepest roots. In spite of all of the fantasy that surrounds the Christmas season, there was something more real about that two-hour escape from reality. It was also one of those few things that was exclusive to my father, my brother, and myself. Nowadays, with my father having passed away and my brother raising a family of his own, when it’s matinee time on the 24th, even if I’m alone, I still feel that I’m with them and at a time in my life when things were a little more simple. No matter what other pressures of life I might be confronted with, for a brief moment, they all get put to the side and in all of my years I have never missed a Christmas Eve matinee.

The Meal 

Getting out to the cinema on Christmas eve was simple in Dubai, and if anything I was spoiled for choice. My family’s traditional Christmas meal, on the other hand, was a little tricky to put together.

The Christmas meal begins with Hungarian bor leves[iv] and the main course is wiener schnitzel with rizi-bizi[v], red cabbage, and German potato salad. This was the original meal as my grandmother would have made it, but over the years it did undergo a few subtle changes such as the wiener schnitzel being made with pork tenderloin instead of veal as a cost-saving measure and the German potato salad occasionally became a dish called fözelék[vi].

I have always been rather adept in the kitchen and have mastered the meal. Even with limited resources, I have managed to put together close approximations such as when I was living in a small apartment in Korea and cooked the entire meal for my girlfriend and me on a camp stove. But, as a Muslim country, Dubai presented a unique set of challenges. For example, under Islam, the consumption of alcohol is prohibited so getting my hands on a bottle of wine to make wine soup was going to be a problem. Second, the consumption of pork is prohibited for Muslims, so I’d have to call an audible on the wiener schnitzel. Finally, I was homeless and all of the pots and pans and cooking utensils I used to use were all the way back in Canada and, even if I did have them, the hotel where I was staying didn’t come with a kitchen.

Though it is a Muslim country, the UAE is also very tolerant and in a place like Dubai, being so multicultural, there are ways to skirt around the various prohibitions. For example, some, but not all, of the larger grocery store chains will have a small walled-off section for non-Muslims where you can buy pork. But, although I could buy pork, I still had no way to prepare it. As for alcohol, there are no liquor stores to speak of and the only place to purchase alcohol in the UAE is at the international hotels. However, there is a caveat in that it cannot be taken off-site and needs to be consumed at the hotel. So, even if I could get my hands on some wine, turning it into wine soup was going to be a challenge.

When I first arrived in Dubai it was nice to once again be able to sample tastes from all over the world and I felt certain that Dubai would have at least one Hungarian restaurant, but my search came up empty. As it turns out, Eastern European fare is not all that popular in this small of corner of the Middle East. With the Eastern European penchant for swine-laden foodstuffs and their near ritualistic consumption of copious amounts of all manner of alcoholic beverages, who could be surprised, really? 

Not far from the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall was a hotel by the south end of the creek called Steinberger and they boasted having a brand new bakery bistro that served traditional German food. Since it was near the cinema it was worth investigating. Though there was no mention on the menu of rice and peas there was wiener schnitzel and red cabbage and after several days of fruitless internet searches and queries at various hotels and shops, mixing and matching various portions of the menu, this was going to be closest I could get. Wine soup would have been a laugh, but they did serve traditional German gluhwein[vii].

I sat alone at a table for twelve and suddenly my family and all of the love I had ever felt in my life seemed very far away and I was clinging briefly to a few tender memories from long ago. Though those memories were sweet, they highlighted the downside of this life that I had chosen and I realized that I was using Star Wars and a German meal – the closest approximations to my childhood sense of wonder that I could find – to stand in for the things that were missing in my life. After all, that is what traditions truly are, they are what we decide to keep in our lives long after those we shared them with have gone. And during my quest to piece together these small but meaningful rituals I could see why people start families of their own, so that they can keep reliving their traditions just as they were and not have to suffer through the bittersweet sadness of facing the fact that time has passed and those days are gone and never to be lived again. The clock won’t wind backward and I can’t bring my father back. My grandmother lives on in her recipes, but with her went just as many traditions and I would happily suffer through another Catholic mass or sing “Silent Night” to have her back for even a day. Now, instead of the repeating rhythms of the seasons, all the Christmases are different and it would be easy to look on this day in Dubai as no different than any other on my travels: I went to the cinema and I ate out – pretty standard stuff. All of their importance was in the meaning that I attached to those acts. 

I was blessed to have had a childhood filled with such loving memories and to have grown into the man I have become. I am just one insignificant lost soul searching for all of the small moments of joy hidden under rocks covering every corner of this world. Each one is a gift, but not all the days are good days. And during the days where I am transported to a time where my world was a little bit smaller, I am not always strong.

[i] The name Santa Claus comes from Saint Claus, Claus coming from the name Nicholas which is also where referring to Santa Claus as jolly old Saint Nick comes from. Nick, Nicholas, Nick-o-las, Nick-clas, Nick-claus, Claus, you can start to see how this all came about.

[ii] Present-day New York City. 

[iii] This was the 80s and movie ratings weren’t a big issue let alone was a theatre’s adherence to enforcing them and, as a result, my brother and I were introduced early on to some films that today would likely have people wagging their fingers at my pop. My brother became a well-respected surgeon and father of three whereas I became a ne’er-do-well and a drifter, so take your pick.

[iv] Wine soup. We typically make our wine soup with a sweet white wine. The concoction is prepared with sugar, lemon zest, and beaten egg yolks so that it becomes frothy. The wine is warmed to just below a boil and added to the egg mixture right before serving.

[v] Rice and peas.

[vi] A traditional Hungarian way to serve cooked vegetables by making a roux and adding it to whatever broth the vegetables get cooked in. Parents are always trying to get more vegetables into their children and fözelék was the easiest way to get vegetables into me.

[vii] Mulled wine. Forralt bor as we would call it in Hungarian. It’s not wine soup, but desperate times…