The smell of Christmas in Eastern Europe is the cold and smoky bite of wet in your nose. The chill of river mist mixed with the low-hanging smoke of a thousand town chimneys.
Winters are not what they used to be. I remember rime and snow, and temperatures falling to -10 degrees Celsius (14 Fahrenheit). Scratching frost off the windshields of the family car turned into a daily routine for months, and kids liked to find the longest possible stretch of a puddle, do a runner-up, and slide on ice as fast and far as they could to the annoyance of the adults. I still do that.
I wonder, this magic of the past… Has it disappeared from the world? Or has it only left our minds, not because the world changed in some drastic way but because we did?
There’s a new photo album available. Give it a look.
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