Season's greetings

Here we are, suddenly it is "the season". I've already seen several days of snowfall (followed by today's rain), and just as I have spent most of my money and nerves buying winter clothes, I am finding myself spending more money and nerves shopping for Christmas gifts. At least I won't be sending them overseas, so I am not having to consider size, weight, customs restrictions and shipping fees, which makes things easier.

The Viennese Christmas markets have produced even more offshoots on the various squares and plazas of Vienna than I remember from 6 years ago, and the smell of various spiced, sweet, hot alcoholic beverages is joining the usual olfactory background of wet streets, car exhaust, döner kebab and cigarets. I am currently going through a non-photography phase (yeah, that happens), and even if I wasn't, it would be hard taking pictures at those Christmas markets, especially since I tend to not see them in daylight. I'd get something like two unknown people's faces (probably with one of them in the process of taking a bite of something) three more people's backs, some snow flakes or steam reflecting my flash, and perhaps a chain of lights in the otherwise black background. So, here's something off the interwebs instead:

 Image credit: MAGMAG Events & Promotion GmbH, from here.

Glühwein, Feuerzangenbowle, Glühmost etc. can be a very nice thing to have on a cold day. However, I remember Viennese Christmas seasons as month-and-a-half long merciless strings of social Punsch/Glühwein events during which I would get more and more disgusted and fed up with the stuff. There was no way out, unless I stopped attending social events. Even when I pulled the emergency brake and stopped drinking it sometime in mid-December, I could still get very fed up with the smell. My years in Tucson were a welcome break from it. First, you have to wait for the weather to get cold enough to warrant making hot drinks (and then there is stiff competition from hot chocolate), second, to the best of my knowledge, there were two people aside from myself who would make it (a German friend and an Australian friend, go figure…), and third, even if it were a popular drink, it couldn't legally be sold and consumed on every street corner. Two or three Punsch/Glühwein events per Christmas season with American moderation on the amount of alcohol consumed turned out just right for me. Of course, this year, my Punsch/Glühwein consumption has ramped up a little, but so far, things are under control. I presume some combination of no longer being a student and still being "new in town" is my saving grace.

But back to the seasons - what is mind-blowing to me is how fast they have changed. In absolutely no time, beautiful fall has turned into real winter - just yesterday, it seems, that tree in front of my office still had leaves on it! Sounds like a trite platitude about how time moves on oh so quickly, and I wouldn't be writing about it in my blog, if I didn't remember the exact opposite feeling from my first months in Tucson. I arrived on July 27, 2007, it was sunny and hot, and it was monsoon season - I distinctly remember the creosote smell in the air, and how I was wondering what on earth that was. Even though, of course, people immediately taught me about it, monsoon didn't mean anything to me. You have to live through the rainless Tucson spring and early summer to understand. The thunderstorms were neat and sometimes spectacular, but the Alps have pretty impressive convective summer thunderstorms, too, and rain as such wasn't anything special to me yet. The change of season from monsoon to fall didn't register a whole lot with me either, partly because I had not yet developed much sensitivity to the high temperature ranges. To me, there was no real difference between the low 90's or the mid-100's, and besides, I did not have my mind wrapped around the Fahrenheit scale yet, so the numbers made no intuitive sense anyway. As far as I was concerned, it was sunny and hot every day, and that meant it was "summer". So, from July to November 2007, it felt like time was not moving at all.

Only over the course of a couple years did I calibrate to the comparatively subtle seasonal changes in Tucson: The winter low desert hiking season and the gorgeous sight of the occasional snow in the Catalinas. The running streams and fields of golden poppy in spring. The dreadful June cooped up in air-conditioned buildings watching the news on wildfires, with the occasional escape to Mt. Lemmon or Mt. Graham. And, of course, monsoon: the slow buildup of clouds, the first time it's humid enough to smell the creosote, and eventually the first rain, drawing me and my neighbors, who I would never see otherwise, out of our suburban dwellings onto the streets, watching the miracle of water falling from the sky. Then the flooding streets, the lower temperatures, plants that had looked half-dead growing leaves, the slopes of the mountains turning green. And the gorgeous sunsets produced by the clouds.

When describing the excitement of Tucsonans about monsoon to Austrians, I used to say that it was like getting excited about the first snow. It probably helped conveying it, but I am not so sure it's doing it justice. Yes, people were commenting on the first snowfall this year, and the second. (The first was a freak one in October, a week after my arrival.) But the talk about beautifully "sugar-dusted" houses and hills, Christmas mood and soon-to-open ski lifts is not comparable to the level of excitement and dominance in conversations that accompanies the first monsoon storms. And one thing is completely missing from the "first snow" talk: the enormous sense of relief. Snow is a welcome and exciting thing (with some downsides, mostly related to traffic, but that's the same with the monsoon), but in the end, people feel more or less entitled to it. Monsoon rainfall is viewed as a gracious gift.