by Sima Kalmens

The crowd parted rather quickly, loud enough for me not to discern between screams of awe and laughter. I saw a shaggy-haired demon heading towards me, staring venemously with tiny, rubber, black dots–eyes. I panicked and turned rapidly to follow my friends, but the demon had found his target. He grabbed my arm and lightly hit me with a stick. The crowd was amused but quickly closed in again. The demon disappeared, the sound of his stick hitting the sidewalk the only marker of his presence.

No, the Alpine yuletide does not involve public humiliation. I had walked right into the middle of an old pagan tradition: men dressing up as demons and running around with sticks, hitting people. Welcome to Christmastime in Salzburg, Austria, a tiny valley town alive with history and beauty, surrounded by the Alps, and at this time of the year, decked out in Christmas markets, which warm the December chill, and weird traditions.

So I was lucky enough to be properly initiated into Salzburg, but despite the title of this post, that wasn’t all I did. The highlight of my weekend in Salzburg was the Sound of Music tour, a four-hour endeavor that took me to all the classic film’s principle locations: the lake, the houses used as the front and back of the Von Trapp residence, the gazebo, and St. Michael’s church–from the wedding scene–which is located in the small town of Mondsee just outside of Salzburg. It was amazing, as well as mildly surreal, seeing all the places that had existed only on my television for thirteen years. However, my favorite part of the tour was seeing the Austrian countryside through the windows of the tour bus as it rolled down the autobahn. I saw rolling green fields, the towering Alps, glistening lakes, and small houses dotting the uneven terrain. I had the opportunity to get off the bus and take pictures of the town of St. Gilgen–and Wolfgangsee, the lake–and Mondsee, which is one of those charming Alpine towns that only seem to exist on postcards.

Salzburg itself is a charming Alpine town, the likes of which also appear on postcards: old European buildings, churches, orange-lit Christmas markets selling traditional glühwein (hot spiced wine) and stollen (Christmas bread), and the ambiance of local authenticity. Despite modern times, Germanic tradition seems to be deeply rooted in Salzburg. St. Nicholas walks around, distributing peanuts and candy to children, the demons float through the crowds with their sticks, carolers sing on the steps of the Dom Cathedral, and vendors at the market dole out–for money, of course–every handcrafted good imaginable. The Christmas spirit is alive and well, and despite the evening chill, I’m happy to be there among the demons.

It’s not often that I climb aboard my soapbox to preach about the morality of modern day pop culture icons. So infrequent is this in my repertoire of daily existence that I had to give my soapbox a solid dusting before I begin. Being a product of the 80’s I am well versed in the sudden overexposure and constant interest in the lives of celebrity and sports personalities. I have seen intrusions into their lives that even a fame-whore would blush at. But no matter how intrusive the lens, or how obscene the question, the general public chalks up the constant media feeding frenzy as coming with the territory, and to simply deal with it.
Normally I balk at this statement. People are people and they need their own share of privacy. There are times though, when I hesitate and wonder when the line between intrusion of privacy and a public’s right to know coincide and become a fine line that is blurred. Of course by now, I am sure that by reading the 10 million headlines pertaining to this figure you have figured out that I am referring to a recent scandal of one of sports all-time-greats, Tiger Woods. I can’t help but feel a bit of sadness at the recent fall of golf’s “golden boy.” Tiger was one of the good ones now fallen from grace. Is the public scrutiny of his numerous affairs too much, or simply the manifestation of a general public outcry of a loss of yet another sports hero. Tiger was the epitome of the “American Dream” a concept that many people living that dream see slipping through their fingers at an alarming rate. Perhaps the fall of another representative of that dream has caused their panic, their disgust and their intrusion into an otherwise private existence.
Do I care if he had affairs? No. Do I care that people have one less person to look up to, perhaps. Having read myself the countless articles, I can’t help but think, where have all the good ones gone? Are there none left that don’t have an army of skeletons in their closet waiting for their chance to surface? How can it be that each time this happens the public is surprisingly surprised? Until the next scandal breaks and another public figure in which many have looked up too disappoints us yet again, I come down from my soapbox. This time, I am hoping that it has time to accumulate more dust.