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The week before Christmas has to be the most anticipated one. Never mind that January 1 is the beginning of a whole new year. A new year brings only broken resolutions, raucous streets and the prospect of 360 more days before it's Christmas again. 'Tis the season to be jolly, after all. Besides, it offers a bubble of hope and optimism amid the swirling effects of natural and man-made negativity.
Every photographable event in the world will have had a Christmas backdrop this past week, and it is in this spirit that we bring you a Photospeak that yule love to pore over.
A little Japanese girl is mesmerised by the sheep and monkey levitating outside her hotel room window, in this Reuters photo, on Monday, December 21. The anthropomorphic animals are men hired to clean windows in costume, but the suspension of disbelief that the child is armed with will allow her to assert her imagination, the truest gift among anything she'll get for Christmas. The Chinese zodiac calendar has designated 2016 as the Year of the Monkey, 2015 having belonged to the Sheep.
This is how a snowcastle made by a five-year-old might look when its ramparts are overrun by a thick-skinned army of ants. It is also how a gigantic snow edifice made during an international winter festival would look when ice sculptors mill about on its towers during construction. The Harbin Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival is an annual festival in China's Heilongjiang province.
The city of Harbin is host to ice lantern shows during the winter, and this festival is a large-scale spinoff that began in 1963 and was suspended during the years of Cultural Revolution till 1985. It will open, on January 5, 2016, for the 32nd time with the theme of "Pearl on the Crown of Ice and Snow". The Reuters image above shows preparations underway on December 23, Wednesday.
Not all is jolly in China, though. Elsewhere, in the city of Shenzhen in Guangdong province, a man-made disaster has made for a carpet of brown rather than white as a landslide buried 33 buildings in an industrial park on December 21, Monday. The site had contained a dumping yard for waste construction material, which is said to have triggered the slip after poor regulation allowed excessive waste accumulation. When the dam broke, yet another city was submerged.
The above Reuters image shows an aerial view of the affected site, smeared in brown. As Chinese ministerial heads roll, this incident harks back to the natural (or debatably man-made) disaster that submerged homes in Chennai a couple of weeks ago.
More tragedy struck Indonesia in the week leading up to Christmas, when a ferry sunk off the coast of south Sulawesi. While the captain and others have been rescued thus far, at least 70 of the 118 persons who had been on board the ferry are still missing. The archipelago has seen several such accidents at sea in recent months. In the December 21 Reuters image above, a woman leans despondently on a board as she searches for information about her family members who were on the sunken boat, at a rescue command outpost in Siwa, south Sulawesi.
You might venture a guess that this is Santa Claus using flares to identify floating bodies while on a search-and-rescue mission at sea. But it's really a Christmas celebratory event in Italy. In the above AP photo, a man dressed as Father Christmas floats along in a tugboat sled, surrounded by swimming reindeer, and dispenses sparkling light to transfigure the placid waters in Imperia, near Genoa, on December 24, Thursday.
Winter has come. And Christmas is a season for warmth, we hear. That snug feeling inside your chest that lets you know you're loved. But this is stretching it a bit far. In the Reuters image above, a street performer 'eats fire on Christmas eve, Thursday, in the City of Paranaque, the Philippines. 'Tis truly a season of diversity, even in the modes of celebration.
Meanwhile, as global warming leers at future generations, New York experienced an unseasonably warm Christmas eve, with temperatures rising to 64 degrees Fahrenheit. The above Reuters photo shows youngsters gaping at whoever is perspiring inside a swelter of a Big Bird costume on a day when the Big Apple broke its all-time temperature record.
Some traditions are not to be broken, even if nature needs to be defied. This Reuters image shows people skiing on a piste (sloping path on a mountain) made with artificial snow using a snow cannon during warm weather in the western German ski resort of Winterberg near Dortmund, Germany, on December 22, Tuesday.
Elsewhere, in Brussels, Belgium, the security heat has been upped since the Paris attacks, and khaki and green camouflage has blended in with the civilian mufti. In the Reuters image above, three little girls pose for a casual photograph in front of the Winter Wonders Christmas market only to have personnel with guns photobomb them.
The threat of climate change and terror may loom, but Christmas is a festival of lights, illuminating human hearts even in the darkest of times. Here, in this long-exposure photograph by Reuters , a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lights up the stratosphere as it lifts off on the left and returns to a landing zone on the right, at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, on December 21, Monday. It was the launcher's first mission since a June failure. The rocket carried a payload of eleven satellites owned by Orbcomm, a New Jersey-based communications company. This long exposure photograph was made by covering the lens in between liftoff and landing.
Here's another way to light up a celestial object. A full moon floats in the light of a man-made star, and crowns the top of a Christmas tree in Beirut, Lebanon, in this AP photo on December 24, Thursday.
The last full moon of the year is called the Full Cold Moon because it occurs at the start of winter. The last time there was a full moon on Christmas Day was in 1977, and there won't be another one until 2034.
Floating orbs of other kinds can be enjoyed less sporadically, if you go to the Kankaria Lake in Gujarat. The waterbody, built in the 15th Century by Sultan Qutbuddin, has been transformed into a recreation hub in recent years. Its annual weeklong carnival, held around Christmas, features various attractions, including helium baloon rides, a Kids City with edutainment events, bobbing rides inside giant transparent Zorb Balls (as pictured in the PTI image above), augmented reality shows, flash mobs, and other light-sound-and-laser spectacles, like the scene below....
On December 25, Friday, the Kankaria Carnival was inaugurated. The 32-acre lake, pictured in the Reuters image above, attracts up to 35,000 people a day and tots up around 25 lakh during the carnival, say sources. It is also known for its cleanliness and effective waste management system.
But things are not as clean in Sarajevo. Schools were closed and face masks distributed in the Bosnian capital on Christmas eve as a canopy of thick smog draped itself over the city. In the AP photo above, layers of fog mixed with air pollution are illuminated by Christmas lights.
There was a different sort of pall over the nearby nation of Palestine, though, where civilians mourned the recent deaths of their brethren at the hands of Israeli troops, on December 25. In the Reuters image above, a Palestinian man and his daughter pay candle-lit tribute during a rally in Gaza City.
No, they aren't Israeli soldiers out in their Sunday best. The above Reuters photo shows an Israeli couple attending a "Trash the Dress" paintball event in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod on December 25, where wedding outfits are deliberately ruined in keeping with a trend in wedding photography.
Though ridden with war and geopolitical strife, even a place in the middle-east sets up bubbles of festivity during Christmas. The AP photo above shows a shopping mall in central Baghdad decked up for Noel as Iraqi Christians buy Christmas decorations.
The wounds of war are always painful. But they sting a lot more during occasions of togetherness like Christmas, when the void left by a lost loved one dilates that much more. In the Reuters image above, the pale graves in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia are splashed with the vibrant colour of a Christmas tribute bouquet. Many of those interred in Section 60 of the Arlington graveyard were casualties of recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
