Images of Christmas in Germany

This year felt like a proper German Christmas.

For a start there was snow. Proper snow, rather than just a dusting which turns to slush on contact with the ground. This is what our driveway looked like.

For a couple of days it looked like we might not be able to get out and buy a Christmas tree at all. But eventually we did venture onto the roads… and found to our surprise that they had been cleared enough to be drivable.

For once it was pretty late when we put up the tree… Christmas Eve no less. We must be turning German!

One of the things I like about Christmas trees is all the different types of decorations you can buy here. I’ve been collecting a few every year for the 18 years we’ve lived in Germany. I went for non-breakable, child oriented designs mainly, because for a lot of those years we had young children… and for some of the other years we had kittens in the house.

Here are some close-ups from the tree.

Happy Christmas from snowy Germany

Getting ready for Christmas is one of those mammoth tasks that I usually can’t even get my head round without either going back to bed or reaching for the sherry bottle (usually in vain as we finished it last Christmas).

This years preparations were particularly fraught, because just when there were vitually no shopping days left, all of a sudden huge quantities of snow fell from the sky. Lovely and Christmassy, you might say….

… but not if you’re trying to do the shopping and the car looks like this!

So during the week running up to Christmas, we were all stuck at home. It would have been possible to dig out the car, of course. But in Germany it would have been illegal for me to drive it in these conditions, as I don’t have snow tyres.

For four days we sat tight, huddled round a log fire, eating whatever was already stored in the freezer or in the pantry. We went back to making traditional Christmas decorations, rather than putting up bought ones. My youngest daughter made some lovely scented baubles from oranges and cloves.

Finally the roads cleared enough for us to make one big supermarket run and stock up on everything we need for Christmas. The tree is up… the lights are on… there’s a huge stack of logs by the fireplace…  so Happy Christmas everyone!

A butter Christmas tree? What?

This is another alien moment. You know. Just when you think you’ve become immune to every weird thing life in Germany can throw at you… something happens that makes you feel totally, utterly abroad.

This was what happened yesterday when my daughter came home from school. She said she’d called in at the bakery in Düsseldorf to pick up a belegtes Brötchen on her way into school.

“And they gave me a free Christmas gift, Mum.”

“Ooh, lovely dear. What was it?”

“A butter Christmas tree.”

“What?“

It was all true. On the table was indeed a butter Christmas tree. There was no denying it. I might not immediately have recognised it, but it said “Weihnachtsbaum” on it in big letters, so there could be no doubt.

Just when you thought you’d got the Germans completely sussed… the sensible, practical Germans. People who can build Audis and Porsches, precision tools and high powered microscopes. And then they bring you the butter Christmas tree.

What a remarkably impractical gift, first thing in the morning, for any school child or office worker who is buying their morning sandwich. For a start, a 100 gram lump of butter is not an ideal extra little snack to round off your breakfast. No, you’re going to have to carry it around with you all day. First into your centrally-heated classroom or office, where it will sit, melting in your coat pocket for several hours.

At the point when it has reached maximum squidginess, you’ll be just getting onto a crowded commuter tram home… with other passengers pressing up against your butter-tree, crushing the packaging (trust me, the lid pops off easily!) and letting the sticky butter embed itself into the lining of your jacket.

For the lucky ones who get a seat on the tram, there will be the heater next to your leg, gently liquefying the butter sludge, so that it oozes from your coat lining and forms an oily puddle on the tram’s upholstery. Soaking into your trousers in the meantime, of course.

I can guarantee that I won’t be taking public transport into Düsseldorf for the next few days… or if I do, I’ll avoid the rush hour and be very cautious about sitting down. I wonder how often they clean the seat covers….

There goes the neighbourhood…

As the nights draw in, we’ve been having some unexpected visitors in our garden. I like to refer to them as Hell’s Bambis.

Initially they tended to hang around the far end of the garden, checking out the old garden house and the kids’ football goal. But over the course of the week they’ve become bolder and I’m finding deer in the courtyard, or on the drive or even in my vegetable patch.

Of course, after all the hedgehogs, rabbits, mice etc. this year, I thought I was used to wildlife around the garden. Deer, however, are on a completely different scale than any of these. You can be walking from the house to the office and all of a sudden you’re confronted with something the size of a small horse… which is looking at you with a look of: “Whoa. Where the heck did that human come from?”

When startled (and I’m confident by now that my appearance is terrifying for a deer… it’s probably the way I do my hair), deer make a strange sort of movement which involves their legs going in lots of different directions at once. It’s as if one leg is saying: “Quick… over the back fence” and another is going: “Yikes – scarper down the drive!”  It generally takes a good half second for the deer to work out an exit plan. During this half second, if you’re unlucky, its flailing limbs will be making hoof-shaped dents in your car, or smashing the cucumber frames or if you’re really unlucky, hitting you in the midrif.

As a result, these days when I go outside, I’m like a member of a SWAT team. I reccy the courtyard before setting off. I check places where I can take cover… and always run when on open ground.

Of course this doesn’t stop the problem when you’re actually in the house. Just when you’re pouring boiling water into a teapot, or plunging samosas into hot fat…you’ll look up and leap five feet backwards because right in front of you a deer is staring right through the window.

A deer at that distance appears to be looking down it’s nose. The expression is very much one of: “There goes the neighbourhood” as it surveys the state of your kitchen and the pile of washing up in the sink. It’s bad enough having Germans round… they who always seem to keep Ordnung in their kitchens. But now it seems I’m expected to tidy up for visiting deer. Fortunately, the state of my kitchen is such, that I doubt they’ll be popping in for a cup of tea just yet…

What do you call a German biscuit?

Germans are remarkably restrained when it comes to biscuits (that’s cookies to any readers from over the pond). For eleven months of the year, that is. As soon as Advent comes around, this changes. Traditionally the Germans bake “Plätzchen” … a wide variety of different types of Christmas biscuits… and the entire month of December turns into one long gluttonous cookie-fest.

There are lots of different types… Lebkuchen, Zimtsterne, Streuseltaler, Mandelhappen, Spritzgebäck… so it was no wonder, I felt, that when I came across this pack in the local supermarket, that the product manager had somehow failed to come up with a name for this brand of biscuits. Maybe inspiration was in short supply… maybe the biscuits are rubbish…. maybe he or she was in a rush. But, honestly…. Butterzeug?

(For non-German speakers, Butterzeug translates directly as “butter-stuff”).

My favourite theory though, was that the product manager had sampled a little too much of one of the competitor’s brands.

 

Germany’s New Outside Minister

Hanging out on the Schwebebahn

This week I went with my visiting father and my youngest daughter to Wuppertal and took a ride on the Schwebebahn.

My grandfather lived in Wuppertal around 1911 – and he had told my father about the marvellous “hanging railway” which runs along the route of the Wupper river, from one end of Wuppertal to the other. So here we were, nearly a century later – three more generations of the family – taking a ride on our ancestor’s route to work.

The first thing you see as you approach the tracks is an amazing iron structure spanning the river and stretching off into the distance in each direction.

 

The train carriages are suspended from the overhead rail… quite a long way up over the river…

 

When we got on the train it was packed… but I managed to position myself behind the driver’s cab where you get the best view over the river…

It’s a fabulous way to see Wuppertal – the views across all parts of the city are spectacular. Particularly as you are suspended so high up.

Every now and then you meet another Schwebebahn coming the other way.

We went all the way from the city centre up to Oberbarmen and back – about half an hour’s round trip.

I’d like to give a vote of thanks to this part of the train…

… this was the bit that kept us attached to the overhead rail.

 

 

The steamy art of making grape juice

Today was finally time to pick the rest of the grapes.

The vine grows all across the pigsty, which I use as an office… and across the front of the barn. In fact, if I don’t cut it back soon, we might actually lose the house.

So out came the ladders… and up I went to harvest this year’s crop.

It wasn’t long before I’d filled the largest pan in the house. I kept some of the ripest, juiciset ones to go with the cheese I bought for this evening… and took the rest inside to turn into grape juice.

One of the best things I ever bought since coming to Germany has been a steamer. Actually I rarely use it – usually only once or twice a year. But owning one has made me the most popular person in the entire neighbourhood. During the summer months I have a stream of neighbours calling round to borrow it, because they have a glut of plums or apples or elderberries or red currants… inevitably my reward for lending out the steamer is a bottle of the juice they’ve made. In fact, I’d recommend everyone to buy a steamer even if you never make juice yourself. At least you’ll make lots of friends!

It’s an odd sort of contraption. There is a pan at the bottom, which you fill with water. There’s a sieve on the top where the fruit goes… and a section in the middle with a tube sticking out where all the juice collects. A funnel through the middle takes the steam from the water up to the fruit.

As soon as you heat up the water the grapes start to sweat out their juice… it’s like a sauna for grapes.

Once the grapes split open, the juice runs down into the central pan and you can collect into sterilised bottles.

Because it’s been extracted in a steamer, the grape juice is sterile – so if you want to make wine, you need to add your own wine yeast. You can’t rely on the natural yeast in the grape skins.  Somehow I fear my kids will drink all the juice before it ever gets as far as a fermenting jar this year though….

I have the perfect face for radio!

This is exciting! I was invited this week to be – get this – a special guest star on Graham Tappenden’s weekly News Quiz. Graham records a podcast of his quiz every other week under the name “Truly German” – though in picking me as his guest, I think he may have been thinking “Bungled German” … because I’m anything but a well integrated seamlessly teutonic citizen of this country. More of a wanabee Kraut. How sad is that?

Anyway… I rose to the challenge and tackled the most tricky and challenging questions I’ve ever come across about current events this week in Germany… which mysteriously didn’t include Müntefering’s crash landing or the Ansbach school attack… but rather less mainstream issues such as Meerbusch school toilets, a terrorist wearing a carrot bomb and footballers getting parking tickets. Not to mention a cat that excretes money.

Anyway… pour yourselves a mug of cocoa, or a glass of pils, sit yourselves down comfortably and listen to it here!

Düsseldorf traffic….GRRRR

Next time the Düsseldorf city authorities decide to close one of the bridges over the Rhine for resurfacing, they should phone me first and check my schedule.

On Thursday I had a speaking appointment at the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft in Düsseldorf at the Goethe Museum. Normally this is a 20 minute drive from where I live – but because all the traffic from the closed bridge had been diverted to the bridge I was trying to use… it took me two and a half hours to get there. I was chronically late and thoroughly embarrassed.

Thank goodness for the very patient and delightful souls who waited for me … and managed to remain in enough of a good humour to laugh at all my jokes!