Twenty-First Century Christmas

The sky is clear and blue, the sun is shining, and it's 3° outside. Yes, it's Christmastime in The Hague. The prospect of snow isn't a reality, as everyone knows it rarely snows in Holland anymore, due to global warming – at least this is what we've been told. At first Ross and I were somewhat surprised that the general public acknowledges global warming so frankly. After all, in North America "climate change" is something that people are aware is likely happening, but the topic is always followed by examples of unusual weather patterns in the past. Not in Holland, people. Al Gore has won a Nobel Peace Prize, and we're having a Globally-Warmed Christmas.

This doesn't mean White Christmases are a thing of the past. There are still efforts to re-create the effect, however most of this is made of plastic. I've seen many Christmas Trees with cotton, or stuffing on their branches that almost looks like real snow if you're standing on the other side of the street and squinting.

Yesterday I was riding my bike down a popular shopping street, and suddenly it started snowing!


It was coming from this machine on a lamppost.


It was a kind of foam, but it didn't disintegrate. It was very popular with everyone on the street, who took photos in the snow, and tried to play in it. The snowball fights were as successful as throwing a handful of feathers at someone. Whatever the snow was made of, I'm certain must be terrible for the environment, and possibly one of the reasons there will not be real snow this year.

In a different part of town, a public skating rink is set up. I read about it on the city's website, and marked in in my calendar as something Ross & I should do. I was expecting a big open rink, kind of like the one at Olympic Plaza in Calgary, or the one in Central Park you see in movies. We saw the rink yesterday, and it's basically a frozen-over kiddie pool.


As we stood there watching five kids barely move, Ross noticed something strange about the ice – it wasn't ice. It was white plastic. This means there was no chill, no shine, no ice-smell, no sounds of blades scraping, no snow-plow stops, and kids could comfortably do things like this:


I since removed this activity from my calendar.

Inside our home, this is as Christmas-y as it gets. Since we're going away in a few days, we don't have a tree. It's been kind of fun getting all our presents and cards in the mail. We're opening them later tonight over Skype with our families.


Merry Twenty-First Century Christmas, everyone.