Thursday, December 28, 2006

A tale about Christmas and being the Perfect Stranger

This article is published in Turkish Weekly of December 27, 2006

Being raised up in the seventies, in the Netherlands in a village with not more than 16.000 people, I started to understand the world from a simple point of view: economy was booming, no inter cultural tensions, the communist were our enemy and, Christianity was divided in Protestants, Calvinists and Catholics. According to these lines we were dating each other. And Amsterdam was not far away, 30 km, but scared us since it was a worldly city with different perceptions and perspectives than we were used to handling.

Christmas was, by that time, a time of reflection. But became later more a time of only holiday, which we needed badly after all the rush and stress we put on our lives. And that time of reflection became more a time to tell ourselves how good we had it; it was a time of consumption, so we baptized our country into the consumption society.

Read the full article here