Christmas in Germany: Part 2

Karl and I had a wonderful Christmas! Our Christmas season began with the celebration of the first Advent Sunday with our German friends, the Küchler family. They showed off their beautiful Christmas decorations...some of which were family heirlooms and very old...and we ate cake, drank a delicious winter fruit tea, and had root beer floats...yes, root bear floats! This family loves all things American, and they are one of the only Europeans I've ever met who actually like root beer. Root beer simply doesn't exist here, but they showed me how they make theirs homemade.



We also celebrated St. Nikolaus Tag on December 6th. We have actually been celebrating this German holiday ever since we were married...every year we put our shoes out in the hallway and the next morning we fill them full of treats for each other. Here is a photo of my shoes filled with candy, hot chocolate mix and a new bell for my bike.



On the 16th I took Karl to the little French medieval village of Riquewihr that I took his parents to when they were here for Thanksgiving. The village happened to to be having a Christmas market that day so we wandered through the very crowded streets eating yummy French food and enjoying the medieval and Christmas-y atmosphere.



On December 21st my parents and my sister, Susan, arrived from Texas to spend the holiday with us. The next day we went into France and visited Riquewihr and then Strasbourg. The Strasbourg cathedral had their beautiful set of tapestries hanging depicting the story of Mary and Jesus...apparently the cathedral only displays these precious tapestries only at Christmas time. We also explored the Christmas market in the square around the cathedral. It was also fun to watch Susan finally enjoy some of her favorite French foods again (she served a mission for our church in France) and to have her there to translate for us. For once, Karl and I didn't feel like complete morons while visiting France!



The next day we visited Baden-Baden, shopped at the Christmas market and the city's shopping district in Lichentaler Allee and looked for last-minute Christmas gifts.



On Sunday, we celebrated Heilige Abend by going to church and then made a stop in a little town near Bühl called Schwarzach to see their beautiful Romanesque church. For dinner we used our new Raclette set. Raclette cooking originally comes from Switzerland and is basically like a cheese fondue. The more modern sets you can find in Europe have a cooking surface that sits on the table with little trays that can be placed under the cooking surface and everyone cooks meats, vegetables on the table, melting the cheese in the little trays. A fun and tasty way to eat!

Christmas morning, after opening all our presents, we made crepes for breakfast on our new crepe maker. A Keller family tradition has always been to go and see a movie in the theater on Christmas Day. Karl and my favorite movie theater is in Strasbourg, France, mostly because the theater usually shows films in their original language with French subtitles...so we can watch American movies without worrying about understanding all the plot points in the German dubbed movies. (Germans really like to dub over foreign languages.) The only thing we don't like about the Strasbourg theater is that we don't speak a lick of French, so it can sometimes be an adventure buying the tickets for the right movie. So we were excited and relieved to have French-speaking Susan with us this time...buying tickets would be a breeze! Or so we thought... At home we looked up the movie times on the Internet. We decided we wanted to see The Nativity Story. Often the French and German (and other languages as well) will translate the titles of movies much differently from the original title (for example, Monty Python and the Holy Grail has been translated into German as Ritter der Kokosnuss = Knight of the Coconut). So Susan found the movie with the French title meaning A Woman Above All Others. She assumed the French were being typical French and focusing the title of the Nativity Story on the Virgin Mary. So off we all went to the movie theater. And Susan flawlessly bought us tickets for A Woman Above All Others, making sure with the ticket lady that the movie would definitely be in the original language, and we all sat down to enjoy our Christmas movie praising Susan's French talents. So imagine our surprise with A Woman Above All Others began and all the characters were modern-day army women speaking Hebrew! And imagine Susan's embarrassment to realize that she had wrongly interpreted the title to be for the Nativity Story! We ended up heading home and watching a DVD instead. So much for going to the movies with someone who can speak French. (We love you, Susan!)

On December 26th we had yet another day of Christmas (remember, Germany celebrates the 25th and 26th as Christmas). We got out of the house and took a drive through the Black Forest...it was beautiful! We made a few stops to enjoy the view and ended up driving to a city called Freudenstadt, which is known for having the largest marketplace in Germany. We walked through the market place (unfortunately, being a holiday, there wasn't much of a shopping opportunity) and visited the city's large Protestant Stadtkirche...a church built in the early 17th century in a unique L-shape, so that men and women would be separated during services. As we continued our drive through the Black Forest, we happened to drive through a little town where the well-known German mineral water Schwarzwald Sprudel is bottled. So we stopped so that Karl, a bigger mineral water fan than I am, could fill up an empty water bottle we happened to have with us. We ended our trip through the forest with a visit to Schauenburg, the ruined castle in Oberkirch.



Unfortunately, all the fun had to end when my parents left for home the next day. We hope you had at least half a nice of a Christmas as we did!

Please enjoy lots of photos from our Christmas adventures here!