Gingerbread House, "Love, Actually," and Lidl

I walked into Lidl to look for gingerbread houses a few days ago.  Lidl is a grocery store, and each year we make gingerbread houses, usually from Costco or Hannaford.  Some years they fall apart immediately, some years we find them slanted by morning, some years they last til New Year's and I let the kids eat them when Daniel isn't home.  (He's much better on the sugar front with them...other than when he buys Nutella.)

In the last month I've wondered a good bit how Christmas is different here from at home.  Some things sound pretty similar: Babbo Natale/Santa Claus; mass; big family meals.  My Italian colleagues tell me that they don't follow all the traditions: no big extended family meals; some visiting; a lot of relaxing.  Sometimes I've thought about one of our favorite holiday movies, "Love, Actually."  Daniel and I watch this every year while we wrap gifts.  The setting is London, there are a bunch of relationships, lots of humor, and yes, of course, love.  So I've thought about this movie as a way to remember that, no matter where we are, Christmas is Christmas: people sing, eat food, give gifts, celebrate.  We're not in a total foreign land in that way -- it's Italy, after all.  Just like "Love, Actually" is England.  We're just folks in another spot.

So I walk into Lidl.  The song playing is "I feel it in my fingers.  I feel it in my toes.  Christmas is all around us, and so the feeling grows..."  This is one of the governing songs of "Love, Actually" as silly as it is.  And I stand there, looking at all these people doing their grocery shopping and their last minute Christmas shopping, and I feel like one of them, preparing for Christmas (though gingerbread houses are all "Finito!" they tell me because Italians didn't wait til the last minute the way I did...same thing happened with Advent Calendars weeks ago).  And we got this song that we all might know.

I laugh and laugh and I sing along to the radio as I go up and down the aisles looking for the elusive gingerbread houses.