Happy New Year 2026

2026 is already three days old by now, so here is my annual New Year post.

As I’ve said before, I’ve never been a huge fan of New Year’s Eve celebrations. Part of the reason is that New Year’s Eve happens only a week after Christmas Eve and I’m usually all holidayed out from three days of Christmas celebrations, so I don’t really feel like having yet another holiday that requires preparations. Of course, I did the party thing and the “standing around on the market square in the cold, watching fireworks” thing, when I was younger. But in the past ten years or so, I mostly celebrated with my parents at home and/or in a restaurant and in the past three years I’ve been celebrating all alone.

Between the Years

The time “between the years”, as we call it here in Germany, is supposed to be a time of quiet and relaxation, but in practice it rarely has been that way for me. Quite often, I have to finish some last minute translation job at this time and even if there is no translation rush job, I have to write both the Darth Vader Parenthood Award and Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award posts, which are a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. And I can’t really pre-write those posts either, because new movies and TV-shows come out right up to New Year’s Eve and a last minute candidate has emerged and gone on to win more than once.

This year, I also had to write this post for Galactic Journey to fill in for a fellow Journey member who had to drop out at short notice for personal reasons. Now Willy Brandt dropping to his knees in front of the Monument for the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto during a state visit to Poland is considered an incredibly important event in (West) German postwar history. Many people who were young at the time have spoken about how inspiring Brandt’s gesture was for them. Whenever you think of Willy Brandt, it’s very likely the first image that comes to mind is that of Brandt on his knees. And since it’s considered such an important moment, I felt I should at least mention it at Galactic Journey, so I offered to write about Willy Brandt kneeling to fill the open slot.

However, that article turned out to be a lot more research intensive than I initially assumed, because even though the image of Brandt kneeling is highly iconic, I realised that I actually knew very little about how it came to be. I didn’t even know where precisely Brandt had been kneeling – I’d assumed it was a concentration camp memorial site, which was a reasonable assumption to make. I certainly had no idea that Brandt’s state visit to Poland was the very first official visit of a West German chancellor to Poland since 1945 (and possibly long before, since the Weimer Republic also didn’t get along with Poland very well) and that West Germany didn’t even have diplomatic relations with Poland until 1970. I also did not know that West Germany did not recognise the current German-Polish border until 1970 and that this was considered highly controversial at the time, because the people who’d fled/been expelled from those parts of Poland which had once been German were apparently still hoping they’d get their former homelands back twenty-five years after the end of WWII. These folks were still being noisy and annoying and whining over their lost homelands well into my lifetime and my generation trolled them mercilessly, perhaps even cruelly about it, since a lot of these people left their homes under harrowing conditions and were traumatised. The whining over lost Silesia, Eastern Prussia or Pomerania has mostly subsided by now BTW, probably because pretty much everybody who still remembers living in those places is well over eighty or dead. Though considering that other people in the world still don’t seem to have grasped that just because your ancestors lived somewhere and were abused or violently kicked out, it doesn’t mean you have any claim to the former home of your ancestors, because other people live there now. So maybe we did do the right thing to make it very clear to those people how we felt about their whining and inability to accept reality.

As for the strikes, protests and unrest that broke out in Poland shortly after Brandt’s state visit, I had never heard about that before at all and stumbled upon it in the course of my research. There also wasn’t a lot of information on German or English language websites about these protests, though thankfully I found a Polish site with a German translation, which covered the events in much more detail. But one of the good things about writing for Galactic Journey is that you often find that what you know about events everybody knows about is either incomplete or just plain wrong.

The Annual Fireworks Debate and New Year’s Night Disasters

Back to modern day politics, the annual fireworks ban debate that was conspicuously quiet last year, returned with a vengeance this year. By now, all the argument in favour of or against a fireworks ban have been rehashed ad infinitum. It also seems that the louder the voices in favour of a fireworks ban get, the more fireworks fans double down and also stockpile fireworks. At any rate, I kept hearing fireworks go off this year throughout December, well before the three days when fireworks may be sold. In past years, you did have the occasional fire cracker going off on or just after Christmas, as people used up leftover fireworks, but not in early December.

So in short, both sides are doubling down. And while I am opposed to a total fireworks ban, I have to admit that having to deal with idiotic fireworks use, taking preventive measures such as taping off the newspaper tube and blocking the mail box, lest some idiot throws in a fire cracker, is making me lean more towards a ban, so I don’t have to deal with this nonsense anymore. Having to clean up the leftovers of other people’s fireworks the next day is also annoying, especially since a storm blew all sorts of trash into my garden this year, including stuff like burned out fireworks batteries that should have been picked up on New Year’s night by whoever fired it.

Worse, the local garbage collectors decided in their infinite wisdem to collect paper garbage on New Year’s Eve, which meant that the trash cans with the paper garbage would have to be left outside overnight – while idiotic teenagers with fireworks were roaming the town. Nothing happened, at least not here, but it could easily have and indeed accidents, fires, etc…, including several serious ones, happened elsewhere on New Year’s Eve. In Germany, two eighteen-year-olds died from the effects of homemade fireworks, in the Netherlands two people died from the effects of illegal fireworks. There also were several serious injuries, fires, traffic accidents and general violence.

And of course, there was the terrible fire that destroyed the historic Vondelkerk in Amsterdam and the even more devastating fire that killed at least forty-seven people and injured 119 in a bar in Crans-Montana in Switzerland, most likely because sparklers set flamable insulation foam alight (and how could a bar still have flamable insulation foam, when this sort of thing has been causing deadly fires for decades now?). And as if all that wasn’t terrible enough, on social media the usual suspects tried blaming Muslims for the church fire in Amsterdam and bar fire in Switzerland, even though by that point it was pretty obvious that the fires had been caused by improper fireworks use. Even after photos and videos emerged which show the moment the Crans-Montana fire started, certain people still found a reason to blame Muslims, since in their minds Muslims apparently cause fires merely by existing. Then they went on to blame the victims for partying and drinking while underage according to US standards (in Switzerland, the minimum drinking age for beer and wine is 16, 18 for harder alcohol) and for not evacuating quickly enough, once the fire started.

Never mind that many fires over the decades have shown that many people will first stare at the fire to see how serious it is and if it will extinguish on its own and often only run when it’s almost too late. People are also reluctant to leave food and drink that they’ve paid for or coats behind in the event of a fire. Again, this is a quirk of human of human nature that has been observed many times and it’s not limited to teenagers. The 1960s and 1970s saw a couple of department store fires (I wrote about the most devastating one for Galactic Journey), where the highest death toll was inevitably in the department store restaurant (remember those?), because the patrons didn’t want to leave the food and drink they’d paid for behind. And those patrons were usually middle-aged to older women.

Besides, the Crans-Montana fire was not a New Year’s Eve fire, but a typical nightclub fire, caused by a combination of improper indoor pyrotechnic use, flammable insulation foam and too few emergency exits. These tragedies sadly happen every couple of years somewhere in the world and at least three of them – the 1994 Switel fire in Antwerp, Belgium (which hit me hard, because the Switel had been our go-to hotel, whenever we visited Antwerp), the 2001 fire in a club in Volendam in the Netherlands and now the Crans-Montana fire – happened on New Year’s Eve. The victims of the Switel fire BTW were also overwhelmingly middle-aged or older.

Also, it’s notable that the fireworks deaths and injuries in Germany and the Netherlands were all caused by homemade or illegal fireworks. And if legal fireworks are banned, there will be more homemade and illegal fireworks, which are a lot more dangerous. Besides, a ban will only be effective, if it is EU-wide. The Netherlands is planning a fireworks ban from next year on and their rules are already more restrictive than ours, so Dutch fireworks fans just pop over the border to Germany or Belgium to buy fireworks. Indeed, in October, i.e. not a traditional time for fireworks, I was Belgium and drove back via the Netherlands, when I chanced to drive through the bordertown of Baarle-Nassau (Dutch) and Baarle-Hertog (Belgian) where you cross the border several times just driving through the town. The town was busy with shoppers taking advantage of more liberal opening hours in one of the countries and the Belgian part Baarle-Hertog had dozens of shops selling fireworks. Meanwhile, Germans often drive across the Polish or Czech to buy fireworks that are illegal here, even though certain Poles don’t want to hear it and attacked me after I pointed out in response to some “Poland good, Germany bad because of Muslims” post on social media (there are a lot of those, posted by hyper-nationalistic rightwing Poles) that ninety percent of problematic fireworks in Germany would vanish if Poland tightened or at least enforced their regulations. Even if the Poles don’t want to heat it, Poland’s lack of fireworks regulation or enforcement is a huge problem for the neighbouring countries. So a national ban in Germany won’t be effective, unless we have an EU-wide ban or at least EU-wide fireworks regulations. Though I wish we would at least ban all indoor pyrotechnics.

New Year’s Eve

The weather, which had been cold, clear and pleasant over Christmas shifted again just before New Year’s Eve, which unfortunately also triggered my low blood pressure and general wooziness again.

I went grocery shopping very early on December 30 to avoid the holiday shopping crowds. Unlike previous years, I had actually planned to have a special meal on New Year’s Eve. I was planning to have Raclette, a Swiss dish where melted cheese is served with potatoes, bread, pickled and other goodies. The original Swiss Raclette, which originates in the canton of Valais, which is also where the terrible fire happened, actually heats up a loaf of cheese and then scrapes the molten part onto a plate, but the version that’s a popular dinner party dish in Germany involves melting slices of cheese on a kind of table grill.

Fondue and Raclette became popular in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s and have remained so. My parents had both an electrical Fondue set and a Raclette set. I still haven’t been able to find the electrical Fondue pot, but I did find my parents’ Raclette set, which I think we haven’t used since the 1990s. Modern Raclette sets are electric, but my parents’ still had a kind of alcohol burner and I certainly wasn’t going to use that, since I don’t fancy burning down my house. So I threw out my parents’ old Raclette set and purchased a new electrical two-person set with a hot stone as well as a package of wooden spatulas (since I couldn’t find ours). Everything was on sale at a local furniture store and cost me twenty-two Euros or so.

Now I had a Raclette set, I also bought Raclette cheese as well as some things to go with the molten cheese (it’s mostly pickles and vegetables, though many people serve thin slices of meat as well) as well as some chili ciabatta instead of the tradition potatoes, since – as I’ve said before – I don’t like potatoes very much. BTW, I did find the little forks that are used for eating “Pellkartoffeln” (peeling potatoes), the kind of cooked skin-on potatoes served with Raclette and other dishes, among my parents’ stuff.

On New Year’s Day, I had lunch, blocked off the mail box again and then took an extended afternoon nap. I’m naturally nocturnal, so I often take afternoon naps. The weather had also shifted to light rain and wind by now, neither of which is ideal for New Year’s Eve.

I woke up again in the late afternoon when the noise level outside went from occasional fireworks going off to war zone. I got up and looked out of the door to see if some idiots were setting off fireworks in front of my house. However, it was only Christian, one of my neighbours, shooting off part of his fireroks. Christian and his wife Franziska have two young children aged four and two, so they got started early with the fireworks, so the kids could enjoy the fireworks as well.

By now, it was time to prepare dinner – Raclette is fairly simple, but it does require some preparations like chopping ingredients and mixing dips and sauces. However, I found that I wasn’t very hungry, at least not hungry enough to indulge in an extended meal of molten cheese over all sorts of stuff. And since the Raclette was new, I at least had to read the manual first as well. Besides, I still had to finish the Darth Vader Parenthood Award and Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award posts, preferably while it was still 2025. So I checked the “best by” date on the Raclette cheese, saw that it will be good at least until late January, and decided that I would have Raclette some other evening, when I did not have to finish two massive blog posts. That’s the good thing about spending New Year’s Eve on your own – that you don’t have to make elaborate meals to satisfy other people.

So I just put the chili chiabatta in the oven and made some salad and had that for dinner.

My New Year’s Eve dinner: Salad with tomatoes, feta cheese, peppers and leek and chili ciabatta. The chilis used are the light green Italian peperoni chilis and you can see the light green bits in the bread.

I also got my New Year’s Eve decoration out and put a piccolo bottle of champagne (a regular bottle would have been too much) in the fridge. Then I went back upstairs to finish my blogposts.

My New Year’s Eve decorations and a glass of champagne.

I think I have shown off my New Year’s Eve decorations before. The candle holder is cast from plaster and handpainted and was a gift from my friend Britta, when I was hosting a New Year’s Eve party thirty years ago. I lost contact with Britta not long after, but I still treasure her candle holder. The pot holds a four-leaf clover, which you can buy in shops here in Germany around New Year’s Eve. I usually plant them in the garden in the spring. The rest are small figurines of things that are considered lucky in Germany like toadstools (poisonous, but lucky for some reason), chimney sweepers and pigs.

The champagne is a piccolo bottle, since a regular bottle is too much for one person. This particular brand is named after Clemens Wenceslaus Nepomuk Lothar, Count von Metternich, who was an Austrian diplomat involved in the Vienna Congress and chancellor of Austrian for almost forty years. I have to admit most of what I know about the historical Count von Metternich comes from the 1931 German musical film Der Kongress Tanzt (The Congress Dances), which is set during the Vienna Congress (see a clip featuring Lilian Harvey in remarkably accurate Regency costume sining “Das kommt nur einmal” (That only happens once) here). Count von Metternich was played by none other than Conrad Veidt of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari fame, who appeared in many silent and early sound horror movies and also in Casablanca towards the end of his life.  As for why a brand of champagne is named after him, supposedly the Riesling grapes used to make the champagne are grown at the vineyards of Johannisberg Castle, which was once owned by Count von Metternich and is now owned by the Oetker Group, whose subsidiary Henkell produces the champagne. The champagne glass is one of my Mom’s vintage lead crystal glasses from the 1960s. Seemingly every household of my parents’ generation had lead crystal glasses like these and since I inherited them, I may as well use them. Though they’re special occasion glasses, because they’re not dishwasher safe.

While fireworks continued to go off outside, I got the Darth Vader Parenthood Award post done with twenty minutes to spare, though I ran out of year before I could finish the Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award post. Though I did include it in my round-up/eligibility post for 2025, because spiritually it is a 2025 post, even if it went live in the early hours on 2026.

At around quarter to midnight, just after I had finished the Darth Vader Parenthood Award post, I thought I’d better go downstairs and get ready for the New Year. I fetched the champagne and filled up the glass and then I changed into outdoor clothes, so I could go outside and watch the fireworks. I miscalculated slightly, because by the time I had finished dressing, the clock on the nightstand was showing already midnight, so I started the new year half dressed in the bathroom.

I toasted a Happy New Year to my action figures, took a few sips of champagne and headed outside to where my normally quiet suburban street had been transformed into a warzone with fireworks going off all around, so enjoy some of my fireworks photos below.

My neighbour Christian, his father-in-law Gerold and their families were setting off the rest of their extensive fireworks stash. I walked over to wish them a Happy New Year, since I’ve known most of them since forever. The younger kids were in bed, but six-year-old Linus was still awake and clearly entranced by the fireworks.

I saw Milena from across the street as well as her mother and young niece come home from wherever they’d been celebrating and wished them a Happy New Year as well. Then I went over to wish Kemal and Iniye, my neighbours on the other side, a Happy New Year. They’s spent the holidays in Turkey, so we chatted a bit about that.

At around half past twelve, the fireworks began to subside a little and I went indoors again. I was just about to change back into my hourse clothes again, when I heard sirens outside and saw the blue lights racing down a neighbouring street. Uh-oh. I went briefly outside, but I couldn’t see fire anywhere – and note that there were still fireworks going off everywhere. The next day, I learned from the Instagram account of our local volunteer fire brigade that a garage had caught fire in a neighbouring street, most likely due to a stray rocket or fire cracker (that’s why you make sure your garage doors are closed on New Year’s Eve). The garage contained a hybrid car and electrical vehicles and hybrids are hard to extinguish when burning, so they alerted a lot of fire engines from the neighbouring villages. Though thankfully, no one was seriously hurt and even the car survived relatively unscathed.

I went back upstairs and finished the Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award post. Then I emptied the dishwasher, did some kitchen clean-up, watched the crystal ball (supplied by a German investment firm which happens to own Times Square One) drop in New York City and went to bed.

New Year’s Day 

New Year’s Day was stormy, rainy and all around miserable, which I hope isn’t an omen for the new year. So I only ventured outside to take some out some trash and otherwise stayed put. I didn’t even go out to pick up leftover fireworks trash, because maybe the storm would blow it away. And if not, it would still be there the following day. Which, sadly, is was. I also found a lot of trash, mostly rocket fragments, in my backyard garden, which is entirely closed off. I suspect the wind blew it in.

I made myself a quick lunch of capellini with fresh tomato sauce, which was tasty, but unfortunately I forgot to take a photo. Otherwise, I didn’t do a whole lot on New Year’s Day beyond finishing up my 2025 round-up/eligibility post.

Snow

The North Sea storm continued through January 2, but the rain turned to snow in the early afternoon. Initially, it didn’t stick, but eventually it did and by the evening there were about eight centimeters of snow on the ground.

Dense flurries of snow in the afternoon at around two PM, but so far very little of it is staying on the ground.

The same view at around seven PM. Now, there’s a lot more snow.

Snow on the terrace and the back garden, viewed through an illuminated star.

Since snow is pretty rare in North Germany, let alone snow that sticks around for more than a few hours, I took the opportunity and went out for a walk in the snow. I headed for the Habenhauser Moor park, which is our local park with a lake and a large playground. I also took some pictures. They are a little grainy, because I had to switch off the flash, since snowfall and mist were messing with it, but I like the atmospheric look.

The large playground in the Habenhauser Moor park in the snow. You can’t see it in the photo, but their kids frolicking in the snow.

While I was walking, the snow picked up again and here you can see thick flurries of snow in the Habenhauser Moor park by the lake.

The barren trees and the bridge in the Habenhauser Moor park in the snow. In the background, you can see the lights of the houses on the edge of the park.

The houses on the edge of the Habenhauser Moor park look cozy in the snow.

A house with Christmas lights in the snow.

Illuminated Christmas decorations in a garden in the snow. These large illuminated stars are popular right now and you can find them in many gardens.

After my walk in the snow, I did some more writing and went to bed. The next morning, at shortly after seven AM, I woke up to the distinctive scratching sounds of someone shovelling snow outside. Now I knew I would have to shovel snow later, but seven AM is damn early, especially on a Saturday morning. But since I felt some pressure on my bladder, I got up and also opened the door to look who was shovelling snow this early in the morning.

Turned out it was my neighbour Vladimir. He has a garden and household services business and was out and about this early to shovel the driveways of his elderly clients free. Vladimir does my garden, because I hate gardening work, but I normally shovel my own driveway. Nonetheless, it was very kind of him to do my driveway as well, so I thanked him and wished him a Happy New Year, since I hadn’t seen him since Christmas. Vladimir and his family normally celebrate New Year in their sauna and backyard hot tub. Which I had seen lit up on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day (Vladimir’s garden borders mine), but I didn’t go over, because I didn’t want to blunder into a party of naked Ex-Soviet immigrants.

I also gave Vladimir the liverwurst and sausage I had gotten in a goodie bag for Christmas from Anna, the daughter of my cousin, and her fiancé Alex. I do eat meat, but I don’t eat sausage, so it would only go bad. The sausage, some kind of salami, was so hard BTW you could have clubbed someone over the head with it.

I did consider going out for another walk in the snow on Saturday, but in the end I stayed indoors, while it snowed some more outside, Berlin suffered a massive blackout due to some leftwing terrorists planning to disrupt capitalism (or maybe Russian agents posing as leftwing terrorists) and Donald Trump decided to attack Venezuela and kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to annoyingly mealy-mouthed reactions from the EU and various European leaders, including our embarassment of a chancellor Friedrich Merz. Whatever you think of Maduro – and yes, he is a dictator and very likely faked the latest presidential election – the US still has no right to start an illegal war in Venezuela and arrest a foreign head of state and it infuriates me that Vladimir Putin of all people issued a stronger condemnation than pretty much any European leader. As for Trump’s justification that Venezuela is a narco-state, well, the reason that there are so many drug cartels operating in Latin America is because the US is such a huge market for illegal drugs and always has been. It’s supply and demand. Besides, we all know the US just wants Venezuela’s oil.

So that’s how I started 2026. As for what you can expect here this year, there will be more thoughts and commentary on SFF and culture in general, more awards discussion, more reviews of comics, books, films, TV and toys, more road trip posts, since those tend to be popular (there may be one soon, because I have a road trip planned, weather willing), more con reports, more toy photo stories, hopefully some Retro Reviews and interviews and whatever else comes up.

In general, I hope that 2026, which got off to a terrible start with a devastating fire, a massive blackout and an illegal war, will be better than it started.