christmas in germany

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It's that time of the year again! I've been getting a lot of emails asking what Christmas is like in Germany. Well, it's nice!

The best part is the "Christmas Markets" which most decent sized towns have, usually held in the center or downtown area. (Although sometimes you will see shopping centers/areas having their own little christmas market too.) It's almost like a holiday craft fair, where people sell stuff in wooden booths. People tend to sell hand crafted items, like candle stuff, figurines, dolls, mostly novelty, knick knack stuff. Good gifts for grandma.

Then there are plenty of food booths, selling sausage sandwiches, crepes, chocolate covered marzipan, eggnog, and on. Everyone has at least one cup of Glühwein, which is hot wine with sugar and rum. It really warms you up when you're standing out in the freezing cold (and trust me, it is FREEZING cold). It's the hang out place for college kids on Friday or Saturday night, so it can get crowded, including plenty of families too.

Then you got the kiddie entertainment. The one in Rosenheim, which is the next town over where I take my German language class (I can see the Christmas Market out the window of the class), has a carousel, a small train, and a swing type carousel. The one at Münich airport has an ice skating rink! Yes, the airport has a Christmas Market! It has a large outdoor area between two terminals where they set the market up. Then you can take your picture with St. Nikolaus! No, not Santa Clause with the big white beard, glasses, red suit, and black boots. This is SAINT Nikolaus, so he has one of those bishop looking hats (red of course) with a big red cape.

So in the States, churches celebrate Advent, right? They do that here too, but people do it at home too (although I don't...). Then the kids have Advent calendars where it's a sort of a flat box, and there are panels for each day of December until Christmas. Behind each panel is a chocolate piece, so each day, you look forward to opening a new day to get a new angel shaped chocolate, or duck shape, or santa face, or bell, and so on. Ok, so it's not totally limited to adults because I have one, and a colleage of JP has one at work too 😊.

As for Christmas music, I hear plenty of American Christmas songs on the radio, which is nice for me. I just watched The Santa Clause with Tim Allen on TV tonight, dubbed over with German of course.

Speaking of TV, I've made more interesting observations I'd like to share. For one, there are a lot of commercials for cell phone ring tones. Like, A LOT. And they are the most annoying commercials ever to be shown in television history. I think it's because 4 or 5 of them will run in a row, and those 4-5 will run at every commercial break. They play clips of the songs (top40 songs)/ringtones, and what's worse, the volume gets louder during these commercials.

Then, in the mornings, there are a few channels that show webcam panning shots of mountain (ski) areas in Austria with Austrian music playing in the background (if you don't know what Austrian music sounds like, just imagine what you think the traditional German music sounds like, with the tuba and accordian, and that's Austrian music). You can see how nice the weather is and plan a day trip accordingly.

We get about 20 or so cable standard channels and about half of them are news channels. Two are in English, CNN and Bloomberg, so I watch CNN most of the time. There is MTV and MTV2, where they play American music videos as well as ones from German artists. And Dan Wyatt would be happy with this: primetime and late primetime are mostly movie slots. There are very few German dramas and reality shows (I've only seen Bachelorette and Big Brother, their version) and I haven't seen any German sitcoms (German don't laugh...ha ha, just kidding...).

JP mentioned that what Americans picture Germans to be like, with the lederhosens and Oktoberfest, come from Bavaria, which is just one state in Germany. But hey, it works in reverse where Germans imagine most Americans with cowboy hats and big pickup trucks, and that's coming from Texas. Apparently, Bavaria considers themselves to be totally different than the rest of the country and want to separate. (I don't know how Texas feels...)

Of course, a lot of Americans would say, oh no, America is so diverse! But Germany is really diverse too. America has a large population of Hispanics & Asians, and Germany has a large population of Turkish, Croatians, Italians, & Russians. My language class has a great mix! We cover all continents except Australia: 1 from US (me), Peru, Argentina, Indonesia, Taiwan, Rwanda, Albania, Maldovia, Turkey, 2 from Russia, and 3 from Romania.

So do I like it here? Yes! I can't understand what most people are saying, but everything else not having to know language is great! As you may or may not know, I'm a practical person. And I would say, Germans are a practical people. If you look at how they make or do every day life stuff, you can see they try to make life more efficient. Ok, this is our American stereotype of Germans (and is pretty true), and they stereotype Americans as wasters (generally true too). More later...

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