Walking back home through Neuhofstraße, I passed Gethsemane Church and spotted a couple of dried up trees shoved into a corner, that must have been Christmas decorations this December gone. Perhaps they had been standing inside the church, perhaps they had been collected from
the neighbouring houses. I could not tell.
I was vividly reminded of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Fir Tree" and somehow surprised to see that these skeletons had not been picked up yet by the city's ever present cleaners.
Usually, people cannot wait to get rid of their Christmas clutter, the same clutter they were so eager to put up, to hang up.
And whenever I walk past those dried up trees and wreaths in early January, I feel saddened, feel pity for them, feel like they must not understand quite what is happening. One minute they are the much admired centre of any living room, the next they are tossed out into the street. Left to die, left to be taken away, to be burned or shredded or fed to animals in the Zoo.
Neither can I help but feel that we people are so much like Andersen's fir tree, who is so eager for his bright future to start, for ever greater things that must surely be just around the corner to take place in his life, that he fails to appreciate the here and now. And so we, too race from one festivity to the next, from one moment to the next, hoping, the very next one will be just perfect and great. We do not even stop to listen, to take it all in. We hurry past the moments in our lives like we are sitting in a car in which we may not even occupy the driver's seat.
There is this ever-restless rushing towards... what?
