Every year, I have but one holiday mission: to do my very best to find that elusive yuletide spirit. It really IS the most wonderful time of the year, and I yearn to recapture that Christmas magic I felt as a kid. Without fail, I will annually commit to the absurdly idealized Hallmark version of Christmas wherein everyone exudes happiness and love, true love could be waiting around every snowy corner, and all the world needs is some tinsel and twinkly lights to make everyone's problems go away forever. All you need to do is find a little Christmas magic.
This year, however, I've given up. The Grinch has won. There's no holiday magic to be found, people are pretty much horrible, and the tinsel and twinkly lights are just covering up the dark and glum reality of December. Fa la la la la. Perhaps the Constanzas had it right. Maybe Festivus is the holiday for me. If nothing else, it's high time I gave the Airing of Grievances a try.
It all started two weekends ago. I needed to pick up a few gifts, and what better activity than retail therapy to find that Christmas magic? I picked up my best friend and together we set off in search of holiday adventure. Earlier that day, another friend had texted that the Made Market at the Bend XPO was a haven for parental gift ideas, so we headed thataways. We walked in the door, and sure enough, the place was PACKED. Holiday crafts and a hundred potential gift ideas for Mom and Dad were everywhere! Most impressive, though, was the hustle and bustle of people running around all over the expo center.
"Are you guys here for the market?" a helpful girl at the front table inquired.
"Yep," I replied in a voice that, dare I say it, was both holly and jolly.
"Too bad," she replied. "We just closed."
I had no idea it only lasted until 3 p.m. It turns out the hustle and bustle we were seeing were all the vendors quickly tearing down their booths. Sorry, mom. We spent the rest of the afternoon hitting up the downtowns of Moline and Leclaire, but gifts for mom and dad were still eluding me. No worries, the best was yet to come. I had a plan.
Anyone who's ever seen a Hallmark Christmas movie knows that if you want to find Christmas magic and maybe even have a meet-cute with your soulmate, all you need to do is find an outdoor night-time Christmas market after dark. It's literally a factory for Christmas magic. That's why I was heading for the Davenport Freight House Christkindlmarkt with purpose and intent.
"That's weird," my friend suddenly said. "What's with all the people?"
Sure enough, we were miles from downtown but there were small crowds gathering along the roadside in places where crowds tend not to gather, especially in the December cold. "It's almost like they're... trainspotting or something." We looked at each other with instant realization. "CHRISTMAS TRAIN!"
Every year, Canadian Pacific rolls holiday-themed trains across North America adorned with Christmas lights. At select stops, the train rolls to a halt, the cars open up, and musicians jump out for surreal quick holiday concerts. It's fun and a great fundraiser for food banks. But as we drove along the highway, it quickly became clear that as we were aiming for downtown Davenport, so was the holiday train. And so, too, were thousands of other Quad Citians.
You know the 1.5 minutes it usually takes to get across downtown Davenport? Thanks to holiday train traffic, it was more like 1.5 hours. Instead of romanticizing the holiday crowds, I quickly wanted to murder them. Pedestrians were just absent-mindedly strolling in front of traffic, cars were honking and getting exasperated, and Christmas magic was literally evaporating in front of my eyes. By the time we found parking (which I'm pretty sure was in Bettendorf) and hoofed it to the Christkindlmarkt, the band aboard the holiday train was hitting its last notes and the 2.3 kajillion people in attendance all converged upon the market en masse.
Suddenly things were less Hallmark-y and more Outbreak-y, as my mind flashed to newscasters warning of the "tripledemic" as I was bumping elbows with hordes of sniffling, snotty strangers. Add to that some overly-aggressive vendors ("HAVE YOU EVER HELD A REAL IOWA PORK CHOP IN YOUR HANDS, SON?") and suddenly the only place I wanted to be was HOME.
My spirit may have been dampened that night, but my yearning for Christmas magic carried on. The next day, I talked my friend into heading for the Christmas celebrations at Bishop Hill, and we spent the afternoon browsing handmade goods, baked deliciousness, and little stuffed Swedish gnomes that are supposed to lend a hand with chores -- but thus far, the one I bought just sits on my shelf like a lazy good-for-nothing. Oh, and if you happen to hear locals tell tale of a couple city slickers who accidentally bumped a table causing a model train to derail and emit sparks and almost burn down the most historic building in town, I'm sure they're talking about someone else.
But I'm happy to announce that the next morning, I woke to discover I'd caught Christmas magic. Oh, wait, no, that wasn't Christmas magic. Instead, what I caught was H1N1 swine flu. By mid-day, I was bedridden with a fever of almost 103. I spent the rest of last week scouring the Quad Cities for that most elusive Christmas gift of all: Tamiflu. I'll spare you the lectures, but seriously, get a flu shot. You don't want this. It was so gross in so many exciting and festive ways. And since I spent most of that bedridden week binge-watching Hallmark movies, I'm pretty sure I will now forever associate Christmas romance with nausea.
So apologies for my humbuggery, but Christmas magic is lost this year and the world is terrible. Or maybe that's just what Santa WANTS me to think. Please refrain from sending three ghosts my way, but if anyone has any Christmas magic to spare, I'm fresh out.
No comments:
Post a Comment