I normally close my house in the countryside for the winter because I do not want the pipes to freeze and burst, but this year my Dutch friends Jeroen and Lennard convinced me (with no arm twisting needed) to keep it open for 2 weeks for them over the holidays. They went down a couple days befor me and started heating the house up. After 2 days, they got the 60cm thick horseshit-straw-mud brick walls from -3 up to 13 degrees C. I was very nervous that I would not be able to join them because of the train strike. Hungarian State Railways (MAV) is striking because MAV <!-- pagebreak -->Cargo is being sold and the workers want a cut of the sale, 200,000 HUF each (1000 USD). It is not even employee owned! I got to the train station early because the union finally announced that trains would run over the holidays, but seat reservations on intercity trains would be ignored - basically a free-for-all. After dithering around for an hour with my train not in sight, I finally went and checked out an intercity to Miskolc that had been delayed 90 minutes already and which I felt sure would be packed to the gills. Although suspiciously almost empty, we left the station 10 minutes later, and I made my connection. There are Christmas miracles!  I did not recognise the house when I arrived! My friends had put up a Christmas tree, Christmas lights and a glowing reindeer in the window, tinsel, and a nice fire in the buboskemence (stucco stove). With a nice glass of Spanish Bobal-Shiraz in hand we deocrated the Christmas tree with traditional Hungarian szaloncukor, Ukrainian ostrich-egg-like ceramic ornaments, and a hand-carved Rwandan nativity scene. The next couple days are a bit of blur. I brought 5 books with me to just chill with, but I ended up "systemising" things with Lennard like cleaning the stables, cleaning the cellar and hauling 80 years of batshit, chopping wood, keeping the fires tended, etc. while Jeroen slaved over homemade bread every day and making an enourmous Christmas dinner. It had to be done sometime, and it helped us save some alcohol for the evenings. Christmas Eve, regardless of my complaints and foot-dragging, Jeroen and Lennard hauled me off to midnight mass at 7pm (it is the village) in the Catholic church. I thought the priest was going to be sick, making large "O"s with his mouth like he was blowing smoke rings with every syllable. We managed to cook everything in the stucco-sparhet I had made. It is not the easiest thing to control the temperature on, but we were able to cook and heat the kitchen with the same oven. Christmas dinner consisted of wild boar (for the Dutchies), turkey in white wine-garlic sauce, a traditional red cabbage dish with vinegar and apple, fried pumpkin rings in beer and cumin-chili batter, an icecream cake, coffee with rum, hot wine, and later drunken Christmas carols. A perfect Christmas, and one I hope to repeat regularly from now on.