Natale 2

Second Christmas in Italy, and it was as Italian as expected: we decorated our 25-year-old Christmas tree up nicely, ate copious amounts of panettone and relaxed properly. But there's one thing that I still can't get used to - that's the social side of Christmas: the streets full of people and bars finishing all kinds of wine on Christmas Eve. Around here everyone just stays home with family or the respective boy/girlfriend and doesn't get out for seeing people before the 26th unless they're very close friends. In Italy, Christmas lunch is held with the immediate family and subsequent meals with various aunts and uncles, fitting a fair amount of friends and acquaintances in the middle. That's quite a run. Luckily I only have one family to visit. My feeling of being an inward northerner increased with each person Riccardo knew and congratulated. Well, the custom of giving the best wishes ("Auguri!") is usually accompanied by a handshake and this would be perfect for me. I like handshakes very much. Instead, because I'm a girl, I was expected to approach the people with each of my cheeks in turn and imitate kisses. This is an awkward business at the best of times, especially when both kissers wear glasses, but with people I had never seen before... difficult.

Any northerner who has been to Italy is probably quite familiar with the inner fight: is a friendly smile enough? should I shake hands? what if I'm supposed to actually touch faces? which cheek first?! An Englishman trying to go along with the most usual Italian hello-how-are-you kiss looks embarrassingly indecent: instead of performing with lukewarm/friendly affection they actually plant a furtive wet semi-erotic kiss on the cheeks of the unsuspecting Italian (almost always a woman) as though they had lost in the bottle game and had to do it on a dare. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Hugging, the standard greeting in Estonia for friends, is a different issue. Italians might feel quite awkward if someone less than a very good friend would start hugging them all of a sudden. It's not easy to determine where are the limits of the various kinds of greetings, so the only foolproof way is to follow the locals. Lucky that Christmas is over...