Christmas Camp for 20-somethings
Written by Sunna Kokkonen, January 2019
The Stand editor spent her December working at a German Christmas market, experiencing the most wonderful time of the year from within
December was a turbulent month for both our dear CEU and the flailing Hungarian democracy. The Szabad Egyetem movement occupied Kossuth Lajos square for a week, and protests on the streets of Budapest grew into clashes between the riot police and the disappointed opposition forces. History was made – and in the meantime, I was sitting in a shipping container on the main square of the East German city of Leipzig, counting Euro bills.
As a graduate student, I’m no stranger to odd (read: shitty) student jobs. Out of the cavalcade of seasonal jobs, the Christmas market has been the most absurd so far – which is an achievement, as I have written HTML code on a Costa Rican terrace while having endangered monkeys throw pieces of fruit at me and sold troll figures made of rubber at a Norwegian UNESCO world heritage site.
Photo credits: Sunna Kokkonen
For starters, the only reason I got the job in the first place was that the recruiter was a fan of my travel blog. The job description is so notorious that it would turn away anyone – but students who have already poured most of the budget for their whole academic year down their throats in the form of pálinka and fancy bookshop coffees. I was working crispy 60-hour weeks for the market, and spent all my freetime on term papers.
The mission of the company I worked for was to extract a little piece of the Finnish winter and to plant it on Leipzig’s main square. The results were comical: traditional reindeer herder tents were put up next to bank district skyscrapers, and the fires where our workers were cooking salmon spread thick, black smoke all around the city center. Most of our staff were locals and therefore had no knowledge about where Finland even was, let alone about the products we were selling. I was no better: a wannabe-poet and a bookworm sweating in the office, pretending to possess wicked Excel skills.
In contrast to various other customer service jobs, the Christmas market never provided us workers with a dull day. The reasons for this were numerous: sometimes the hygiene inspector found the labeling of our Finnish alcoholic beverages to be inadequate, and my task was to find out what the booze contained, make it into an ingredient list and translate it into German. Heavy snowfall often led to power outages and we spent countless hours crawling on the floor or climbing on rooftops trying to restore electricity and running water to our kitchen and food stands. In addition, Leipzig is famous for its nightlife and leftist-green attitude towards the corporate evil that our company represented. In other words, showing up at work notoriously late or not at all was business as usual. Thanks to the workers’ unreliability, I got to experience almost all the roles we had from decorating the garbage contractor with spruce branches to mixing Finnish gin-based cocktails at the bar.
Photo credits: Sunna Kokkonen
In fact, the Christmas market didn’t really feel like a job, but more of an extended summer camp for twenty-somethings. In only five weeks of non-stop coexistence, our hundred workers grew incredibly close. The young Finnish cook I shared a room with reminded me a lot of my little sister, and we spent our scarce free time sipping tea and giggling about boys. The simplicity of our tasks themselves often drove us to gossip and rumours about the web of romantic encounters between the workers – or turning the kitchen, aka the sandwich-factory, into an EDM party with lousy 90s tunes.
At the end of the five-week Christmas camp, not only did I earn enough money to support myself until the summer, but I also revived my rusty German, aged a handful of years thanks to stress, poor nutrition, and neglecting my human need for shut-eye, drunk enough mulled wine for the next ten years and made friends with a bunch of fellow lefties and hippies.
As for my ultimate fairytale ending? I experienced a true Christmas miracle and met my techno-loving Prince Charming selling salmon at our food stall.
Photo credits: Sunna Kokkonen
