postcard 13: holidaze

better late than never 🙃

There’s a Christmas tree in the main square, reaching for the inky blue sky that’s growing darker sooner and sooner each day. The fact that the temple next to it is older than the baby’s birth the tree is celebrating is not lost on me. We meet our friends and stroll the cobbled streets with mulled wine, stopping for little donut holes called fritule covered in nutella.

The streets are sparsely populated, despite the fact that every year round resident of Pula seems to be here. Our friend Maddie reminds me that includes us now and it makes me smile as we pass and empty stage blaring AC/DC amidst green and purple lights.

The sky is brilliantly blue and the seas are calm, something that we’ve realized is a rarity for the winter months here. We post up on the rocks overlooking a tiny pebble beach for the afternoon and watch as Hazelnut chases the waves, getting braver and braver with each dip into the water. We picnic on salami and cheese and pick through the rocks for the teeniest tiniest shells I’ve ever seen. Topher gives the last piece of salami to the cat who lives in the boarded up beach shack, even though he’s certainly the one who gave Hazelnut worms the week before, and we pick our way back to the car, past the fishing boats and empty campgrounds.

I’ve shipped the last magazine issue of 2023 to the printer for work, a feat thanks to moved up deadlines, so we celebrate with a morning ice skating adventure. There’s a dinky little rink in town and we strap on ancient rental skates and dodge the elementary schoolers zipping around the ice for five minutes before we call it a day. They have apparently not heard of sanitizer spray here and our socks smell like a million pairs of sweaty feet, so we stick bare feet in our shoes and get coffee in the square under the Christmas tree instead. The next morning we go to the sports store and each buy a pair of ice skates.

The grocery store is full of panetone, massive legs of prsût wrapped like a Christmas ham and baccala, salt cod for the Christmas Eve stew that makes me smile to see every time I walk by it's stiff form thanks to Strega Nona. We’ve finally mustered the courage to use a real cashier at the grocery store instead of a self check out and have been rewarded with little sticker books we can exchange for discounts when they’re full.

The holidays are slower and quieter here, December days paired down to just the sweet little traditions that make us happy, if not a little homesick. Advent calendars and Christmas movies in bed and secreting tennis balls away for Hazelnut’s Christmas morning. It reminds us that Christmas has a magic all of its own.

-Mikaela