Aother people just stay at home. And wait there for the presents. They go to their bedroom to read or to the kitchen and cook and bake or watch a Christmas film under the Christmas tree in the living room in which beautiful people are waiting for the presents at home and cook and bake and read or a guy in a moose sweater joins them goes out with the dog and falls in love with the new neighbor outside in the deep snow, and in general everyone wears fluffy wool sweaters and lives in wooden houses or hangs in front of the fireplace in slippers and listens to soft jazz or the Bach oratorio, and then the bell rings like in a novel by Thomas Mann, and there are gifts.
For me, however, Christmas only begins as soon as I’ve driven past Porta Westfalica. And even there I’m not quite there yet. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen my whole family at Christmas, but I’ve seen the damn Porta Westfalica regularly. The gateway to Westphalia. An imperial monument, on top of a mountain. If one can speak of a mountain at all in a low mountain range. The Porta Westfalica stands where the Weser flows into the North German Plain. My gateway to Christmas.
Now I take a picture every time and send it to a friend who also has to stop by here. Maybe he’s sitting in front of me on a train, maybe he’s following me, maybe he’s already arrived. I also take a photo of Minden train station every time, where he gets off. It’s really not a pretty sight, but he always sends a heart back. Just because I’m not waiting for the bell in front of the fireplace in my wool sweater doesn’t mean I have to do without rituals on the train at Christmas.
Next year I’ll be celebrating a small anniversary. Then it will be thirty years. For thirty years I would have sat on the train at Christmas every year. Sometimes it wasn’t until December 24th, usually the day before, and the train didn’t always go from east to west, past Porta Westfalica, because where home is has shifted a few times on the map in these thirty years. But I always drove. In the train. I could count on one hand the few times I haven’t done that in all the years that I’ve stayed where I am or been picked up by car. Also the few times it snowed or was cold at Christmas.
You also go back in time
In recent years it has mostly rained when I drove during the day. Then the gray world around the Porta Westfalica looked like in a song by Blumfeld, “a sun of iron and a language of sorrow”. Whoever writes lines like this must be from this corner of the world, and so does the singer, and anyone who thinks it’s Christmas blues, rain and sad songs from the past doesn’t know the bittersweet feeling that such journeys trigger at this time of year.
You don’t just drive somewhere. It also takes you back in time. A feeling between homesickness and time sickness, forlornness and anticipation. At Christmas with your parents you are automatically twelve years old again, always, as the writer Wolfgang Herrndorf once said. But he usually hitchhiked home.