My Florida niece wrote this Christmas wasn't sure why she always thinks back to Christmas in Berlin. Well, she has an excuse--she was a kid then. There is certainly that tendency to remember your "Santa Claus Christmases." One of the years I was there, she had the lead in the "Krippenspiel" (Christmas Pageant. I was always an angel!)
But I recall those German Christmases fondly too, and I was 50! Something extraordinary about a society that lights one Advent candle, then two, then three and finally four. That doesn't put up the tree till a night before Christmas and puts real candles on it when it does. It seems real candles require a great deal more attention than electric lights. Still, as the days become shorter and darker, lights are in many ways a great a consolation to us as bonfires were, I am sure, to the Neanderthalers.
Still I can't help but remember those mid sixties years when we kids, sang at midnight mass, and ran
over to the Old Grove to skate for a couple hours before we had to get nylons, heels, wool skirts--only female heathens wore pants to church in those days. My astonished great-nephew exclaimed, "You guys had midnight mass. "Yes we did!"
I am not sure why that was so astonishing. A more recent X-mas memory is the "Weihnachtswindmuehle" that I found in a Chariton, Iowa junk shop and Pat Kurt, loved (maybe because he was German; it's a German thing.) He's been dead 9 years this coming April and since I have had it out of the box once--to take it to a East Side classroom I gave it to Charlie, is either a little German or pyromaniac. At any rate, it found a home this Christmas, and I am happy.
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