Holidays are scary. That’s true for a lot of people — people with broken families, or painful upbringings, or bad memories. There’s a lot of emotional baggage tied up in Christmas for a lot of people, with all these images of happy families and cozy fires and professionally wrapped gifts.

For me, Thanksgiving and Christmas were always the big holidays of the year, and I have a lot of happy¹ memories traveling to my grandparents for them. But things fall apart; over the course of a few years my grandmothers died and soon after so did my mother, and with them went most of my holiday routines. Since then we’ve been cobbling together traditions of sorts,² but nothing’s stuck quite the same way. Like most things you had as a child and subsequently lost, I’m not sure you really can get it back.

At any rate, currently bouncing around Europe, it just didn’t make a lot of sense to fly back to the United States for a week around the holidays.³ At the same time, being alone over the holidays can be profoundly depressing. I had made arrangements to spend Christmas with friends elsewhere, but they fell through shortly before December. Rather than freak out, or beg around, I just booked a flight to London a couple days before Christmas and hoped for the best.

And as luck would have it⁴ a friend of mine had been medivaced to London mid-December for knee surgery. He was hoping to be cleared to travel home before Christmas, but ended up staying through to just before the New Year. My holidays were a mix of cocktail bars, Christmas Markets, museums, theater shows, and a long, languid Afternoon Tea on Christmas Day. If I couldn’t spend it with family, it was a very good consolation prize.

I was in town to attend The Smoke, a yearly larp festival held early in January, which made New Year’s Eve easier to navigate. I spent that evening hanging out with friends (many of whom were in town for the event) and, three days later, saw them all again at the larp festival.

The Smoke only runs a couple days, and generally attracts more experimental larps. The larps tend to be short (only 2–3 hours) and there’s only four slots for them over the weekend. In practice that provides a lot of time to mix and mingle with friends and fellow larpers. It’s a nice festival; if I had any major complaint it would be they tended to run out of food for lunch and the spaces for socializing were cramped and loud — as someone who has trouble focusing on conversations to begin with, I found myself dragging people outside into the freezing cold just to be able to have a five-minute talk with someone.

While I enjoyed most of the larps I tried, I thought many of them needed work, or at least tweaking. I wasn’t sure what the authors were really trying to do with them — or maybe I was able to figure out what the authors were trying to do, and the design just didn’t quite do that effectively. The exception was Sarabande,⁵ a larp set in Montmartre in the 1890s. Over the course of two hours, you play out ten days among the artists in a particular tavern; at the end of each scene you reset and start the day over. The real key is that there’s no dialog; you communicate through dance, or painting, or poetry, or short impassioned arias.

This probably sounds goofy (if you’re imagining watching it), or terrifying (if you’re imagining playing it). And it is, for about 20 minutes. But you start to settle into it, the logic of the scenario asserts itself, and before you know it the final scene is starting, they’re calling “Last Call,” and you find yourself dancing with your brother’s murderer. Over the course of that dance they, overcome with remorse, will admit their guilt. You, finally free of the grief you’ve been bearing for years, will forgive them. And then, with both of you at peace and accepting of your fates, you will strangle them to death, because there is simply no other way this could have ended.

Larp may be weird, and can be hit or miss. But sometimes, you find yourself creating something sublime, and it’s only then that you remember why you’re putting yourself through all of it in the first place.

I’m currently on a flight to Dubai, where I’m spending a night before heading off to India for a month.⁵ It’s an abrupt transition. Part of why I was socializing so intensely is because I’m largely going to be on my own until I’m back in February. But I’ve spent a solid two weeks making friends, and hanging with existing ones, and we’ll see how well that all sustains me for the next four weeks.

Next: Dubai (DXB) to Delhi (DEL)
Prev: New Year’s Eve, 2018, London

Footnotes

¹ Mostly happy. Holidays can be stressful times.

² My father’s replacement for Thanksgiving has been to go to Vegas over the holiday. As often as not in recent years I’ve spent that weekend in Nevada seeing variety shows, gambling, and eating at buffets. It was only recently, as I was standing on the Strip across from a indifferently accurate replica of Paris watching a ridiculously indulgent fountain show blast water all over the desert, that it occurred to me it probably captured the essence of modern America better than other ways I’ve spent Thanksgiving.

³ I am, in fact, still moderately terrified of flying, making my current travel arrangements somewhat paradoxical. I’m working on it. Long-haul flights are significantly worse than short ones. I try to stick to 3 hour flights or less.

⁴ Well, my luck, if not his

⁵ Designed by Jeppe Bergmann Hamming and Maria Bergmann Hamming. You can find it here.

⁶ Why India? I needed to be somewhere for a month, I’ve never been, and I’ve no interest in spending a winter all that far north if I can avoid it.

I grew up outside of Cleveland, Ohio, and all the places I’ve lived — Paderborn; Columbus, Ohio; Manchester, New Hampshire; Chicago; New York City — have been firmly situated on the “cold to stoopid cold” scale in winter. I only recently realized that was actually a choice, and one I wasn’t obligated to make.