The Advent and Christmas markets are open. We held our traditional Santa Claus business mixer on Thursday. Mikulás himself will have rushed around Hungary filling shoes with candies by a week from today. Before we know where we are, Christmas will have come and gone, and the year will have turned.
For no good reason that I can think of, 2023 seems to have absolutely whizzed past. I’m pretty sure we say so most years (I’m pretty sure we say that, too), but it really does feel oddly accelerated. Perhaps it is just me, but judging the rate at which time passes seems to have become harder ever since the pandemic when spending so much more time in the home office made it more challenging to find points and places to which we could pin events. Why that should have carried on into late 2023, I cannot say, but I was listening to an update of a memorable story on the radio the other day and was flabbergasted to hear the event itself dated back to January.
Perhaps it is the pace at which we live our lives since we came out of lockdown. In part, that is the natural result of needing to catch up commercially, but also on memory making. Our BBJ mixers seem to mean more since we brought them back, and I know plenty of sports fans who say the same about attending live games. I may have mentioned this before, but we at BBJ Towers have been flat out all fall. Our sales team has been working wonders; I am incredibly proud of our group of writers and especially of the production studio. My page designer has been near non-stop.
There is light at the end of the tunnel, and fortunately, it appears not to be an onrushing train. This is the penultimate print issue of the Budapest Business Journal for 2023. We have one more special publication to pull together, one last BBJ, and then we can begin to relax. And it is an appropriate time of the year to do that. Whether you follow the liturgical calendar or not, whether you believe in Baby Jesus or St. Nicholas or not, Advent is to Christmas what Lent is to Easter. It is a time of preparation. A period of calm and reflection before the child-friendly madness around the Yuletide Tree. I hope to see some of you at our mixer and others between now and the Holidays, but regardless, I do hope you get some time to pause, take a breath, and think back on all this year has brought.
Robin Marshall
Editor-in-chief
This editorial was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of December 1, 2023.
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