I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!
This week - in fact, for the whole month - we’re celebrating the holiday season in Brussels.
We have one hard and fast rule in our Hiberno-Belgian household: no Christmas trees before Sinterklaas. I can’t quite remember when this rule was instituted, but if I had to guess it’s only really been enforced properly since the children came along.
The rule is intended to hold back holiday creep, wherein Sinterklaas - the more important of the two, at least when it comes to Belgian children (because that’s when they get the lion’s share of their presents) - is edged out in favour of Christmas and Santa Claus. Now, it’s not an issue for most Belgian families because Belgians don’t really do Santa Claus (or the Christmas Man, as he’s known in Dutch). But one of the settlements we made when we founded our part-Irish, part-Belgian household was that we would incorporate both present-bringers into our festive calendar, with that aforementioned proviso.
As November ticks over into December, however, I do sometimes chafe against it as lights and decorations pop up all over the city and Brussels succumb to festive fever. But no Christmas tree before December 6, and no Christmas songs either (that is a relatively recent innovation that I can definitely tie to the children' s gradual takeover of our Spotify account.
This year the rule was extended to cover all family-based Sinterklaas celebrations at the grandparents, meaning the first opportunity I had to buy a tree and put it up in the living room was December 9. Which I duly did, traipsing up to the nearing florists on a soft Monday evening after work and school, with the children in tow, to buy my 16th Brussels Christmas tree. Actually, I realise now we have three Christmas traditions - no trees before 6 December, no Mariah Carey before Sinterklaas, and the tree has to be real.
And as the year comes to a close, those Christmas trees are as good a measure as anything of my time in Brussels. Because we’ve moved around Brussels a bit but not much, that means a lot of different trees from a lot of different locations, mapped onto changing family circumstances and a changing relationship with the city. Some were bought in a hurry, others after a lot of procrastinating research. Cheap, expensive, alone, and with the kids. Always real, though. So here, to the best of my recollection, is a list of all the trees I have bought in the all 16 of the Christmases I have spent in Brussels.
2009
The first Christmas we spent in Brussels, I barely knew the place. We’d only been in the city since the previous July and I hadn’t ventured much further afield than the route of the 61 bus into town, and the walk from our apartment off the Leuvenseteenweg to the Alliance Francaise office on the corner of Kunst-Wet where I was doing French classes. When Christmas came around, with no smartphone and dodgy internet, I didn’t really know where to go for a tree, nor how much the average one might cost.
I went for a walk around our neighbourhood, heading up the Leuvensesteenweg away from the city, thinking not unreasonably that a busy thoroughfare like that would surely have a shop or two selling trees. I was halfway to Place Meiser when, starting to get cold, anxious, and tetchy, when I finally came upon a street corner florist with wrapped-up Christmas trees stacked vertically in tidy columns by the entrance. These being the only trees I had discovered on my walk, my bargaining power was limited and I handed over €50 for a dumpy little Nordmann, dragging it back along the main road and up the stairs to our fourth floor studio, happy just to have found something we could decorate.
2010
18 months in, and I was now cannier. I knew the city better, though I still didn’t wear its chaotic urbanism very comfortably. I was also wise to my previous mistake, and having gotten to know our neighbourhood a little better I knew I had significantly overpaid the previous year. Instead of seeking out the same florist as in 2009, this year I made for one of the nightshop-alimentation generale stores that line the Rue Verbist as it climbs up from Place St Josse to the Vincottestraat where we lived. Walking home from town one day I saw that this particular shop - a dark, narrow but deep shop where I’d previously bought a large metal can of ghee - had trees crowding around the front door and spilling onto the pavement outside the entrance. A sign next to them advertised Christmas trees for sale, with a price tag: €20. Though the walk up the hill was a steep one, it was short. And anyway, after my previous experience, how could I pass up a deal like that? I decided not to think where the trees might have come from to allow for such a low price, handed over the money, and hauled it home.
2011-2014
Things start to get a little fuzzy now. By the Christmas of 2011 we’d decamped from Schaarbek to the centre of town, a one and a half bedroom apartment on the third (fourth?) floor of a shabby building on the Place de Jeu de Balle in the Marollen. When I chart my relationship with Brussels, everything before our move here I treat as something of a prelude. The three years I lived on that strange little square were my formative experience of the city. It’s where I was mugged for the first time, where I drank craft beer for the first time, where I proposed, and where I became a dad. I have a vivid memory of going down to the near-ish Sunday market at Gare du Midi for a Christmas tree, but I can’t pin down exactly which year it was. Presumably I bought our trees at the market every year we lived on the Vossenplein; there was - presumably still is - a florist’s stand located next to one of the grimy station underpasses where we got our trees, which might have been the only thing I ever bought from the market, save for bags of smoked paprika from one of the many spice dealers, and the odd watermelon.
What I remember most about those trees was the getting rid of them in early January. Getting them up to the apartment in December was uncomplicated; we had a lift, and the tree was usually wrapped in plastic netting. Getting them out, on the other hand, was a more involved ordeal. The tree, by this stage desiccated and shedding its needles profusely, was a challenge to wrestle into the pocket little lift. On the ground floor there was a narrow tiled hallway we shared with a sandwich deli, the owners of which - never the most level-headed of neighbours - would fulminate each year about the trail of discarded brown needles we left in our wake as the tree’s branches banged off the white tiles of the walls and floor as I struggled to get it from the lift to the front door. I was happy, though, to give them something to complain about. They liked complaining, and they did not like us. I like their witte pens rolls though, and the smell of the caramelised onions from the outdoor grill they’d set up every Sunday to feed visitors to the square’s daily flea market.
2015-2019
I don’t know where I first saw the ad for the Noel pour tous Christmas tree initiative, but when I did I thought, “I’m a good person, I should support this.” Now I don’t even remember what exactly I was supporting, where the money I handed over for a Christmas tree every year for four years ended up. Just as in 2009 and 2011, 2015 was a year of starting over, in a new house and a new corner of Brussels. Koekelberg, where we moved in September that year, was relatively unknown to me at the time. I’d only visited the house we bought there once before we signed, and had only the briefest of walks around the area. There was the Simonis metro terminal, the big basilica at the top of the hill, and not much else as far as I knew. Certainly few florists or Christmas tree sellers, as far as I could tell. So when I saw a local initiative selling Christmas trees from a nearby secondary school, with the proceeds going to charity, it simplified my thought process. I’ll just go there, then.
The only issue was, the school was a 40 minute walk away, I did not own a car, nor did I have a bike capable of transporting a large tree. So the first year I picked up the tree from the Sacre Coeur school next door to Jette’s municipal cemetery, I broke my back dragging it through the Jette backstreets to the nearest bus stop, which was not near, and then dragging it from the bus stop nearest our house, which was also not near. The following year I’d figured out the tram network a little better, so was able to take the number nine more or less end to end, standing a little sheepishly with my arm around the tree, in amongst grumbling commuters and schoolchildren on their way home.
One of those years I forgot my gloves, and I forgot the weather said it would rain. By the time I’d returned with the tree my fingers were chafed raw, my shoulders ached, and I was wet through. There has got to be a better way to do this, I thought. And there was. By 2018 and 2018 we’d bought a cargo bike - I am going to limit my proselytizing here, only to say that it is the greatest invention of the 21st century and the best-value purchase I have probably made in my entire life, please see me in the comments if you’d like to learn more - which turned out to be the perfect tree-transporting vehicle.
2020-2022
The Covid fog descends. I have a photo on my phone from Wednesday 9 December 2020, taken by me at a set of traffic lights between BeHere and Greenbizz in Laken. In the cargo bike cabin in front of me is a tree, sticking awkwardly out of the half-zipped plastic flap that’s meant to cover the children when it’s raining. I have no recollection of being there, and I have no idea where the tree came from.
In December 2021, all I remember is us picking up a tree on a spur of the moment decision on the bike ride home from school. Ordinarily there would not have been enough room in the bike for two children and a tree, but we appear to have made it work, judging by the existing photographic evidence. If memory serves, we cycled past a small Delhaize convenience store which, for some reason, had trees for sale out the front, blocking the narrow footpath on the main street opposite the basilica. Was I trying to be spontaneous? That’s the only explanation I can think of.
December 2022 is a little clearer in my mind. For the first time, the children came with me (I think, I’m sure of it), along with their Leuven cousins, to again buy a stumpy little Nordmann from a florist’s just off the Spiegelplein in Jette.
This was a relatively uncomplicated purchase, a short tram there, a short one back, and in between watching as a man hired by the florist sawed away at the base of the tree we’d selected to even out the base and make it stable and straight for the wooden cross he then hammered into it. In the yard of the florist, with a queue of other people buying their trees building up behind us, the tree looked pretty straight when the man handed it to us. When we did at last get it home off the tram, of course it wasn’t straight, leaning heavily to one side as we placed it in the usual corner in the living. The children didn’t mind, however, and got down to dressing it up.
2023-2024
The Covid fog lifts. For the previous two years, we’ve gone back to the same florist’s, because it’s easy. Not because it is cheap. I could, I suppose, go looking in our neighbourhood, for the equivalent of those cut-price Rue Verbist trees. I am surprised though how few places I have seen selling Christmas trees up around here. Every November florists unfurl their gazebos and roll out their flower stands at the entrance to the metro at Simonis and at the foot of the basilica to sell potted plants and bouquets as part of the commemorations of All-Saints and All-Souls.
There doesn’t appear to be the same level of entrepreneurial enthusiasm for Christmas. The Delhaize, last time I checked, is still selling trees, but none of the nightshops and food shops on Place Simonis have any plastic-wrapped conifers under their awnings. Not that I’m looking too hard; I’ve settled into a nice rhythm now. I have my shop, and I know where I’m going the first Monday after Sinterklaas. I don’t need to think about it anymore. Things have, it seems, gone full circle. An overpriced tree from a nearby florist will do me well enough now, thank you very much. Although I wish I was still paying €50 for a tree. €80 is daylight robbery!
Notes
“… so was able to take the number nine more or less end to end, standing a little sheepishly with my arm around the tree…” I can imagine this charming scene in a Hallmark Holiday TV movie, where the Christmas spirit overcomes the grumpy train commuters and they cheer on the young man wresting the tree home to family. Cheers.