December Highs and Lows

This was a busy, but not hectic, month. We did a lot, cooked a lot of delicious meals, (my daughter and I) took a few trips, and experienced the joy of the Christmas season. Germans really know how to do Advent and Christmas. I feel like Christmas in the U.S. is about sales, shopping, rushing around, and stress. The rushing around and stress were partly due to the fact that I was working full-time as well, of course. I haven't had any rushing or stress related to the holiday, and M has been able to stay out of the office for several days!

It's New Year's Eve now, and we're about to start preparations for our Raclette dinner. After that we'll watch "Dinner for One" and have our Bescherung (gift exchange) with my Schwiegermutter. Christmas has really lasted more than a month for me! I had Thanksgiving and Christmas with my parents and both kids in Wisconsin on November 26th, Christmas with M and my daughter on December 24th, and now tonight we combine Christmas and New Year's Eve with M's mother!

But without further ado, here are this month's highs and lows:

HIGHS

• spending a few hours at the Tübingen Chocolate festival with my daughter


• visiting Esslingen's Weihnachtsmarkt und Mittelaltermarkt


• a bus trip to Bad Wimpfen with my daughter for its Weihnachtsmarkt


• spending five days in Rome with my daughter - I was not as "wow-ed" as I thought I would be at the time, but as time has passed I have realized how glad I am we went there and had that experience. 
  


• seeing Disney's musical Tarzan at the Apollo Theater in Stuttgart


• going to Stuttgart's Weihnachtsmarkt and riding the Paternoster (open, constantly-moving elevator) in the Rathaus with my daughter's friend


• interviewing an Esslingen author, two of whose books I have read and enjoyed; this was really my daughter's thing, which she arranged to aid in her senior project about Schwabenkrimis (Swabian crime novels), but I came along and enjoyed meeting and chatting with her!


• several days of having no plans whatsoever where we just stayed home (and cleaned, read, did laundry, etc.)!


• receiving ten Christmas cards and letters from family and friends in the U.S. I used to receive many more before I moved here, but the number sinks with every year. I hope it's not that Christmas cards are becoming a thing of the past, because I love them!


• Christmas Eve with M and my daughter


• getting an email from my son saying he earned a 3.692 GPA in his first semester at UW-Green Bay! That's three As and a B! (Ähm...better than his mother did most terms in college)


• eating the sausage rolls Martin made
  
  
  


• lamb Stew for dinner on Christmas Day - but we'd nibbled on sausage rolls and weren't even hungry for it!


• making Maultaschen with my daughter on Christmas Day - we froze them to eat on the weekend
  
  
  


• Sunday brunch at our favorite local restaurant


• welcoming my Schwiegermutter, who will spend a few days with us around Silvester (New Year's Eve)


• getting an email from a former student (although we teachers don't have favorites, he was definitely one of those!), whose cousin I happened to be sitting next to while flying from Frankfurt to Chicago in November! I usually don't chat on planes, but he was wearing a Wisconsin Badgers hat and I decided after several hours to ask him if he was from Wisconsin. Turns out he lives in the town where I lived for 17 years and had cousins who attended the school where I taught...


• booking a week at one of Glengorm Castle's self-catering apartments on the Isle of Mull in Scotland for September, 2015. (This is where we got married in 2006.)  OMG!!!!
  
  
  
• Watching "Dinner for One" on Silvester (New Year's Eve). It's tradition!

LOWS

• having to listen to a bunch of darn annoying, disruptive, unchaperoned teenagers during Tarzan


• finishing preparing the meat filling for the Maultaschen and realizing I had not thawed the Nudelteig (pasta dough). It takes six hours to thaw.


• saying good-bye to my daughter who is returning to college; I'll see her (and my son) again in June when she graduates from Lawrence University!


• Realizing at 17:00 on Silvester (New Year's Eve) that I forgot to buy the Schweinebraten (pork roast) for our New Year's Day dinner. The store closed at 16:00 and will reopen on January 2nd. Oops. 

Questions of the Month:

1. Why are there pairs of policemen and/or military personnel all over Rome? Does this mean the city is very dangerous, or that it's a safe place because armed cops & soldiers are all over??


2. Why would parents or teachers allow a group of unruly young teenagers sit in a theater without supervision? And why, after both my daughter and then I "shushed" those kids and they got disparaging looks from others around us, did they not realize or care that they were disrupting other people?


3. The fireworks are for 12:00 midnight. Why have people in our neighborhood set them off at 10:00 am, 17:00, and 17:40?


4. How could I forget to buy the damn roast?!?


5. "So, what do we have in the freezer?"  (Turns out we have four duck legs. Duck it is!)

Happy New Year, everyone!  Wir wünschen euch einen guten Rutsch ins Neujahr!  (We wish you a good slide into the New Year!)

Some Like It Cold

Let me first say that it is not cold in Germany, at least not where we are. I'm cold pretty much all the time from September to mid-June, but technically speaking, it doesn't get very cold here - at least not in relation to the artic chill of winter in Wisconsin.

I don't bother converting degrees Celcius into the Fahrenheit I'm used to because math formulas and I have never been friends. I just know that double-digits are pleasant, high 30s is blazing hot, single digit temperatures are manageable, and negative numbers are below freezing. Good enough.

We keep our house at about 20 Grad (68 °F) during the winter, and it usually stays around that in the summer, too. Each room has a radiator that can be adjusted as needed, or turned off altogether. We don't have air conditioning and don't need it because our walls inside and out are made of concrete. Our basement is always cooler, so on extraordinarily hot days I have the option of going down there and rearranging the storage shelves. We do have in-floor heating, which I must admit is quite nice in the winter. We're not sure why those who built the house put the in-floor heating in the living room and Wohndiele (foyer) and not the bedrooms or the bathroom, but oh well.

I should point out - because that's the point of this post - that most of our house is kept at 20 Grad. M likes to sleep with the window open even in the gray dead of winter, so it's decidedly colder in our bedroom. I brought a thermometer in there today, and the mercury stopped falling at 11.9 Grad (53 °F). This was before the sun went down. The window stays open all day long because we're never in there during the day and it would therefore be silly to close it and turn on the heat.

Is this a crazy German thing? His mother does it, too, and she grew up in northern England. Do all Europeans do this? M says he gets headaches if he doesn't get fresh air while he sleeps, and I surely don't want that.

I can't believe I'm going to admit this, but despite the shock-freezing horror that has become what I used to call "getting into bed," I actually have grown to like sleeping with the window open. Our Federbetten, which I have written about before, are fabulous, and while mine is 55° when I first force myself in, it warms to the temperature of my skin 'round about the time I stop screaming and thrashing around. The thrashing probably helps to warm up the blanket; at least that's what I tell myself. And I've always liked cold pillows. It's the cold nose that I don't really enjoy.

Early this morning I woke up with my right hand sticking out of my blanket and dangling off the side of the bed like a piece of frozen meat. I dragged it back under the blanket to thaw and went back to sleep. But not before I noticed both of my husband's feet sticking out of the end of his blanket, toes pointed to the ceiling, like Pore Jud from "Oklahoma". He says this is how he regulates his body temperature and doesn't get too hot while he sleeps under his thick blanket.

As if this weren't enough, we also air out the house periodically. M does this daily when I'm gone. No matter how cold it is outside, we need to exchange the bad, stale air for fresh, by opening the damn windows. All of them. In every room. Naturally the Germans have a name for this madness - it's called Lüften. In the U.S., we just live with the bad air until Spring. But not here. We go to each room, open the window and turn off the radiator. I then retreat to the sofa under my warmest blanket and wait for M to say, "That's probably long enough, don't you think?" Then I dash from room to room closing the windows (except in our bedroom, of course - I just shut the door) and turning on the radiators again. He usually plans this for when I'm gone so he doesn't have to listen to my bitching.

This was my daughter today during our Lüften:

I guess cold is relative. My mom has mentioned a few times how cold our house is (she and my dad were here in the winter of 2012), and my Schwiegermutter just said today that she knows our house is cozily warm. When she slept at my parents' house a few winters ago, she was unable to close her bedroom window one morning because a foot of snow "got caught by the mosquito screen!"

Despite our arctic igloo bedroom and the periodic Lüften, M gladly makes me a fire in our Kachelofen whenever I ask him to, so I'm not really complaining. This is just another one of those charming differences between life in the northern U.S. and life in southern Germany. Or maybe it's life with my husband. Hard to say.  :-)

Heiligabend

How do you spend Heiligabend (Christmas Eve)?

Our Weihnachtsbaum in the Wintergarten

When I was growing up, Christmas Eve was always the big celebration with extended family. My aunts, uncles, and cousins came from the Appleton and Minneapolis areas to my grandparents' home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and my parents, brother and I lived also in Sheboygan. There were 15 of us. I remember always starting, after everyone had arrived, with cheese and crackers and shrimp cocktail while final preparations were made in the kitchen. My grandfather said a lengthy, heartfelt prayer, and then we consumed a delicious dinner of ham (sometimes turkey) and a billion sides, salad, and several desserts. After dinner we had at the pile of presents under the tree, which ended up being somewhat of a rip-tear-"Thank you!" fest, but we paused every time someone came to a present with an attached poem. My grandparents were into writing cutesy rhyming poems for the special gifts, and they were usually funny or clever. After the carnage of gift opening was over, the wrapping paper was stuffed into garbage bags, ribbons, bows, and gift tags were put back in the box to be used the next year, and our presents were placed in neat piles, we headed off to church. After church the Appleton crew usually drove home and the Minneapolis contingent bunkered down to rest up for the 6-hour Christmas Day drive home.

I have lots of fond memories of family Christmases, which were often loud, full of energy (and definitely full of love), stressful at times, and truly special. It worked out nicely to have the extended family celebration on Christmas Eve, and then our private family Christmas was the next morning as soon as my brother and I could will our parents out of bed.

Our celebrations here in Germany are quite different, mainly because we are always a small group and there is absolutely no hustle, bustle, schedule, or stress. This year we have the fewest people ever - just my daughter, M, and I are celebrating together. My Schwiegermutter is spending Christmas with her daughter and her family this year in northern Germany, but she'll be back with us for Silvester (New Year's Eve).

This is how we're doing our quiet little Christmas Eve:

This morning I walked to the butcher to pick up our €100 order that will get us through 'til next Monday: soup meat & bones, beef tenderloin, pork tenderloin, ground beef & pork, leg of lamb (for Irish stew), and sausage meat (for Maultaschen and sausage rolls).

Then M started the beef soup for tonight's Fondue, which will boil on the stove for several hours. We usually do fondue on Silvester and Raclette on Heiligabend, but my daughter likes fondue better and she'll be back in the U.S. by Silvester.

While my daughter tended the soup M and I drove to the bakery at Norma to see if they had any fresh baguette and rolls left, and we were pleased to find that they did and weren't even busy! Mental note for next year: no need to buy the bakery the day before!

Our tree is up but not decorated yet (another difference to the way we did things in America - the tree went up at the end of November), so we'll do that next. M puts on the lights, and we girls will hang the ornaments under M's watchful scowl. He prefers just the traditional Weihnachtskugeln (Christmas balls, I like to call them), but I brought all my ornaments from the States - dogs, stars, mini picture frames, apples, sheep... and I love the wooden ornaments I keep buying at Weihnachtsmärkte.

Next M will make my daughter's favorite part of the fondue dinner - Sahnedip. This stuff goes on everything - fresh veggies, bread, meat, and sometimes just on the spoon. It's not exactly low-fat, but it's delicious! It's best to make this early because it has to sit for a bit to let the tastes blend.

We'll have a light lunch so as not to spoil our appetites for the fondue, and then we'll watch the sickeningly adorable film, Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel, which has been a tradition in M's family since he was young. It's a 1970s Czech version of the Cinderella story dubbed into German with really, really terrible special effects. At one point Rosalie the friendly owl is supposed to be circling in the air, and one can't help but see the string to which the fake beast is tied as someone out of view swings it around in a circle. Through much of the film the prince and his pals cavort around in the snow wearing tights and shockingly short tunics. But it's part of Christmas, darn it, and we watch it every year. The theme song has burned itself into my brain, and I'm not at all creeped out by the look on the dashing prince's face on the DVD cover (yes, we own the DVD) as he gazes with unclean thoughts at the little peasant girl dressed in virginal white.

I'm thinking about introducing the cartoon version of the Grinch who stole Christmas as a possible alternative.

After our Christmas movie we'll take a nap and then start schnibbling vegetables for the fondue dinner and opening the jars of other nibblies to put in decorative dishes. We heat up the soup again, pour it into the fondue pot, put everything on the table, and the final step is to slice the tenderloin (beef and pork). Then the slow and leisurely feast begins, not to end until we can't fit in another spoonful of Sahnedip. We skewer bits of tenderloin and a mushroom, and the rule is, of course, that if anything falls off into the soup, it can't be fished out. We eat the soup and whatever bits have fallen into it the next day for lunch.

After dinner we'll have our Bescherung (gift opening), which we do slowly as well, one at a time. Following that we'll listen to David Sedaris's narration of the Dutch St. Nick tradition, which we've heard many times but it still makes us laugh like crazy people.

And that's it. We usually finish the evening browsing new books (Christmas in our family isn't Christmas without new books), and perhaps watching a little TV or a new movie if it's early enough.

Tomorrow we'll have another quiet and relaxing day. My daughter and I are planning to make Maultaschen from scratch, M will make sausage rolls, and we'll have Lamb Stew for dinner.

Lamb Stew

We wish you all frohe Weihnachten!

Treat Yourself to a Book

Oh. My. Goodness. Have you ever read a book that you don't want to put down, but you want to force yourself to put it down and finish it slowly, savoring every word because you know when you finish it, that's it? No sequel, not even any other books by the same author.  Yes I can re-read this one, but I will never again have the experience of reading it for the first time. This novel has made me gasp, laugh, cringe, nod in agreement, grab for my highlighter, and want to bitch slap someone - anyone.

Here it is: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

If you are a lover of books, reading, letters, and fictional characters you'd give nearly anything to meet in person, read this book.

I'm 33 pages from the end, and I'm procrastinating finishing it, though there's nothing I'd rather do this morning. I first tore myself away for a shower (it is nearly 10:00, after all), now I'm writing this, and next my daughter and I will be battling the fortified-by-the-impending-3-day-holiday-closure Monday crowds at the grocery store. After that I'll probably walk to the butcher, and then it will be lunch time. After lunch on Mondays I call my parents in the U.S. and we talk for an hour or two, so it does look like I'll manage to put off that "I've just finished the best book I've read in ages, and no other book on my pile will be as satisfying as this one" feeling for a while longer.

I should write a review, but I haven't written one of those since college, and I probably didn't even write one then. Hm. I'll ponder what I would write to honor this book, but in the mean time I can direct you to the person I owe thanks to for bringing the novel into my radar in the first place, who wrote a review of it in November, in her blog, Confuzzledom.

I have seen several blog recent posts by expats listing stocking stuffer gifts for travelers, most of which make me wonder if I've been missing the mark on stockings. I normally put in there an apple, an orange, a bunch of Christmasy chocolates, Gummibärchen, and a book. A book in my stocking when I was a child is responsible for my lifelong love of Collies and the amazing writer Albert Payson Terhune. I know our parents gave us other small gifts in our stockings along with the fruit and candy, and I'm sure I liked them all - but that is the only stocking gift I specifically recall, and I still have it on my shelves, tattered and worn though it is from being read so many times.

Anyway, treat yourself to a book this Christmas! Go to a bookstore if you're lucky enough to live somewhere near a real bookstore - every town worth a visit in Germany has at least one, though in the U.S. small family-owned bookstores (and any bookstores in small towns) are a thing of the past - and browse the shelves.

The book you need to read will find you.


"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers." ~Juliet (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)

Closed for Christmas

Can you believe there are only three (or four, depending on when and how you celebrate) days until Christmas?!? Today is a quiet Sunday - remember all stores and businesses are closed on Sundays in Germany - and we've lit our fourth Advent candle on the Adventskranz (wreath). Although I did some cleaning and laundry this morning (shhh...don't tell anyone!), I've spent most of the afternoon alternately reading and napping.

This is how my daughter and I often spend part of Sunday afternoon...
You may not be able to see them, but the books we were just reading
are on the table.

Tomorrow and Tuesday are our last days for making sure we have all the gifts, food, and drinks we need for the days of Christmas, and I'm already fearing the madness we'll face at the grocery store. Granted, many stores (including our grocery store and the local butcher) are open on Christmas Eve morning, but that is not the day I want to go shopping. I will walk to the butcher that morning to pick up our Christmas order with all the meat we'll need through Sunday, but that's not the same as shopping.

As of noon on Christmas Eve, stores here are closed. If I forgot an ingredient for any of our planned dishes, too bad for me. If we run out of something we didn't anticipate running out of, bad luck. Stores are closed on Christmas Day, Boxing Day (that's December 26th, Americans), and Sunday the 28th. Can you imagine what the grocery store is going to be like on Saturday? Wild horses wouldn't lure me into that store or any other that day, and I love horses!

I am pretty sure my American readers cannot fathom living in a place where groceries are not readily available at least somewhere at any time of any day. "What if we run out of milk before we make the mashed potatoes because Aunt Ellen uses more than we expected for her coffee every morning?!" "What if Uncle Dan drinks all the beer on Christmas Eve and we've got none left for the football game on Christmas Day?!" Over here, you deal with it and do without. And there's no football (or any other sport I've aware of) on Christmas Day.

Why are stores closed on December 26th? For the same reason they're closed on Karfreitag (Good Friday), Ostermontag (Easter Monday), Dreikönigstag (Epiphany), Christi Himmelfahrt (Ascension Day), and five other religiously important days during the year in addition to January 1st, Labor Day, and Tag der Deutschen Einheit (the Day of German Unity).

Get this -- families in Germany are encouraged and able to spend Sundays and holidays together relaxing, celebrating, or doing whatever else they want to do without being tempted by big holiday sales promising life-changing savings on items one should not even consider trying to live without. Even the poor souls who work in retail and cashiers are able - downright forced - to have these days off to spend them as they will (as long as they're not doing noisy yard work, and in some communities their neighbors will talk if they are even hanging laundry outside to dry, since one really should not do work of any kind on Sundays or holidays!). Husbands cannot be sent to the store by their wives because an item on the grocery list was forgotten, which also means they also don't have an excuse to pick up an extra case of beer.

Those working in gastronomy tell a different tale, since restaurants are generally open on Sundays and holidays - and therefore most choose a different day of the week (often Mondays) to close for the evening. This is very helpful for the rest of us, who have little else to do on Sundays and holidays than go for a hike or bike ride followed by a nice meal out, but I do feel sad for them knowing they have less family time than the rest of us.

And here's the thing, though I've said it before: I love the fact that stores are closed on Sundays and holidays in the name of family ("Family Values", anyone? You know...that phrase that's thrown around passionately in U.S. politicians' campaign speeches and mud-flinging when it suits their purpose to use it?). That means we have to plan ahead and make sure we know exactly what we need for each meal during an extended period like this week. That's not exactly a hardship.

I think it's blinking ironic that in a country where so many give lip service to "family values" (the U.S., I mean), families are lured away from home on holidays into stores to fight (fist fight, in lots of cases, particularly on Black Friday) other shoppers for the lowest prices on the current season's most popular items. The insanity of Black Friday now begins the day before - on Thanksgiving. I suppose it doesn't make any difference. A third of the country is sitting in front of their TVs watching football, another third is fast asleep in a food coma from the Thanksgiving meal (this enormous and delicious multi-course meal is usually consumed in less time than it takes an Italian to enjoy a glass of wine), so what's wrong with the rest going to work and shopping?

I guess that's one way to do a holiday.

For me, I will continue to enjoy our enforced quiet holidays and the fact that our community is basically closed for Christmas.

Frohe Weihnachten from our house to yours!