Christmas in Germany is a little different compared to America. For a kid the Christmas season officially starts December 1st. That’s when your parents put up an “Adventskalendar” on the wall over your bed. It’s a special calendar filled with chocolate and each day you’re allowed to open one of the 24 little doors to get one tiny piece of chocolate. So very early on children in Germany are being forced to become little criminals by figuring out how to get to all of the chocolate without getting caught.

I never got caught; I was always smarter than my parents. Except one time. I remember my mother was very angry with me because I had already emptied half of my calendar on the eve of December 2nd. I tried to blame it on my sister and it worked. It must have been that surprisingly guilty look on her face. Boy, she got in big trouble that day! As her punishment she had to take my calendar and I got hers which, by the way, had been completely looted. My sister has always been smarter than all of us …

Did you know that Santa Claus comes to Germany on December 6th? He sure does! Children put their shoes outside and when they wake up in the morning the shoes are filled with lots of candy. That will keep their blood sugar high enough to make it to the most important day: Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve is the day Baby Jesus comes to bring presents to the children. I assume He volunteers to do so since Santa is busy in America during that time. Christmas Eve is also the day most parents consider leaving their families. Forever.

Take my family, for example. My dad always waited until the very last day to put up and decorate the Christmas tree. It used to drive my mom crazy because she was stressed out over all the things that needed to be prepared for our special night and dad wasn’t available to help.

There would be a lot of arguing, yelling, pouting, crying, cursing and sometimes even beating going on during the day. I was never bothered by it too much because I knew at night everybody would sit at the dinner table, happily unified. It was the only day of the year with a guaranteed happy ending.

Everything had to be taken care of by 4 pm. That’s when our mom took us to church. Dreadful 90 minutes would be ahead of us in an old church that was so crowded, you could hardly breathe. It’s safe to say that our pastor was the most boring individual within the German borders. The only thing that kept us awake (and some people alive) was the fact that there were lots of presents waiting for us under the Christmas tree when we would get home.

After the service we’d hurry home to see what Baby Jesus (i.e. our dad) had left for us. Dad would open the door and clear the view to a beautiful Christmas tree (with real candles!). Christmas music would be playing and from this moment on we would be one happy family, with lots of smiles, kind words and hugs.

Christmas dinner. It used to be one of the highlights of the year. As long as I remember we’ve always had the same dinner. We called it Christmas Shells but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you the real name. We knew it was some type of meat that was prepared in the oven for hours. Our mom would serve it in little plates shaped like sea shells. We loved it!

Until one Christmas Eve my sister opened the refrigerator in the early morning hours and fainted at the sight of a huge tongue of a cow. That was the day she turned vegetarian and the following year we switched to Fondue, which had always puzzled me because I didn’t find out about the tongue shells until last week. I’ve been trying to get in touch with Dr. Laura ever since but the line is always busy.

Right before dinner there was one obstacle to get out of the way: a quick visit to Grandma. She used to live in an overheated apartment below us. Grandma was nearly deaf and married to a man who would mercilessly chew your ear off once eye contact was established. I guess that’s the reason why I can’t remember what he looked like.

Grandma would force us to eat ginger bread and we did, but only because we wanted that envelop which contained 100 bucks. Thirty minutes was usually more than we could handle among an old woman who couldn’t hear anything we were saying and an old man of whom we didn’t want to hear anything he had to say.

So we would all go back upstairs to have tongue shells…

Merry Christmas, everyone!

This entry was posted by Michael Meyn on Monday, December 12th, 2005 at 7:28 am and is filed under Meyn's World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or a trackback from your own site.