So this was the final week of 2023. And I managed to create all weekly blog posts … not always in time, but 52 entries. One could almost say it became a habit.

I like it and will keep doing this in 2024.

Christmas

Of course there was the inevitable Christmas holidays last week. We had our whole family together in our house in the countryside and it was lovely. The preparations didn’t felt as stressful as the previous years. I guess because the kids are much more relaxed about the event as they grow up and we also didn’t had too much family duties outside our own family. Large parts of the relatives were not in the country. So no visiting duties this year 😉

Instead we had time to attend some of the last advent gatherings in the village. The Christmas mess in the church was with the largest attendance in years.

I attribute this partially to our successful attempts of improving the village community bonding with the “newly” founded society. It’s now two years old but became quite an institution already.

Our goal was to bring the people closer together again by means of various low level events and communication. The village has a mix of people who live here in the 2nd or 3rd generation, but also quite many people who only use it as a vacation place on the weekends or as a retirement home. One can imagine that these people naturally have rather different expectations (and also backgrounds) to their life in the countryside. This can lead to tensions. Our theory was that once people causally get to know each other over a nice dinner and some drinks for example, they’d start respecting each other a little bit more and develop some more empathy again.

We had several events organised over the course of the year and openly invited everyone. Not just by a poster on the central pinboard, but also by putting flyers into everyone’s mailbox and approaching people on an individual basis. Our emphasis was to make the contact and communication as human and personal as possible. One hardly resists kindness 😉

And I think we already see the positive effects. The tone in the central village WhatsApp group is much more respectful and calm meanwhile. Where we had heated arguments about almost everything in previous years, people now focus on the topic and seem to assume good intentions. As we also meet in person on a regular basis, new acquaintances have been made and I’m tempted so say even new friendships. People discovered their common ground rather than pondering about their differences.

The rest of the Holiday week was calm and relaxing with good food, sauna, reading, swimming in the lake etc.

As last action of the fading year I tried to graph the water level in the local lake. There is a water level gauge that I’m taking pictures of whenever we go swimming. I tried to put the readings in Excel and create a graph to show the changing water level. We’re not back yet at where we’ve been in the begin of 2023. But there is hope as it’s raining a lot lately.

New Years Eve

This year we tried Cheese Fondue but partially failed. I think didn’t had the correct cheese and also missing an essential step: the starch plus the cherry liquor. Anyway… I still enjoyed it.

At around 11pm we drove to Templin to attend the “Orgelknaller” at the Maria-Magdalenen-Kirche. That was a short organ concert after which we climbed up the church tower to watch the fireworks over the city. That was quite spectacular. It’s amazing how much money people still pour into this shit. Yeah it’s looks cool. But seriously … it’s stupid.