Why My Family Celebrates Four Weeks Of Christmas
Growing up as a German child in Australia, I was always aware that I inhabited two cultures simultaneously, but never more so than at Christmas. We celebrated Christmas just like our neighbours did; we just did it slightly differently.
For one thing, we celebrated on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day. We didn’t eat Christmas turkey or ham – we had Christmas trout. We even sang different carols. Along with Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and We Three Kings of Orient Are, my Christmas repertoire included O du fröhliche and Leise rieselt der Schnee. Conveniently, some of the best-loved German carols had been adopted by Australians, which made it easier: a quick lyric change and Stille Nacht became Silent Night, O Tannenbaum became Oh Christmas Tree.
The biggest difference between our Christmas and the Christmases around us, however, was that for us, Christmas was more than just a one-day event. For Germans, Christmas is an entire season, and I could tell when it was getting close without looking at the calendar. First, the jacarandas would bloom. Then the trays of mangoes would appear in the shops. And then the house would fill with the scent of cinnamon and vanilla as my mother began pulling tray after tray of Christmas biscuits out of the oven.
German Christmas comes with all sorts of rules. (Most German things come with all sorts of rules.) Take those Christmas baking sessions. The timing was very precise. The first batch of baked goods should be available for nibbling on the first Sunday in Advent, four weeks before Christmas, the true launch of the festive season. It was the day we lit the first candle on the Advent wreath, the day I got to open the first door on the Advent calendar – and the day we were allowed to start eating fresh-from-the-oven Christmas treats. There were plenty to choose from: the crescent-moon shaped Vanillekipferl, the black-and-white chequerboards of Schwarz-Weiss-Gebäck, the honey-sweetened Lebkuchen, and Christstollen, the fruit bread loaf packed with nuts, spices and dried fruit. My favourites were always the Zimtsterne, star-shaped cinnamon biscuits with a brittle meringue shell over a chewy, nutty interior.
Baked goods were only one of the culinary highlights of the Christmas season. My second-favourite day, after Christmas Eve itself, was December 6, St Nicholas’ Day, when a boot-full of tasty goodies would be left in the windowsill for every child,. These would often include seasonal treats that my grandmothers would dispatch in Christmas parcels from Germany, many of which contained copious amounts of marzipan.
“Our Christmas has changed in many ways. Now that we can call or email friends and relatives at any time, there is no need to send long Christmas updates. My grandmothers are no longer with us but if they were, they wouldn’t be sending Christmas parcels anymore – we can pick up many of our favourite treats at Aldi.”
To many Germans, marzipan is the taste of Christmas, and they find all kind of ways to enjoy it. It can be served in long gold-wrapped bars covered in dark chocolate – known as marzipan bread – or in small rounded balls covered in cocoa powder, known as marzipan potatoes. (Germans have a serious carb fetish.) Then there are domino stones, bite-sized layers of Lebkuchen, apricot jelly and marzipan coated in dark chocolate.
December wasn’t all about eating, of course. A lot of time was also spent sitting around the dining table working the Christmas assembly line. Some days we were packaging up cellophane bags of biscuits to gift to other people. Some days we were writing the Christmas letters and cards to send to family and friends overseas, an important ritual at a time when overseas telephone calls were expensive.
The culmination of the season was Christmas Eve when the Christmas tree was unveiled. The tree would be smuggled into the house by my parents; I knew when it had arrived because the living room would suddenly be off-limits, the door firmly locked. Our first glimpse of the tree would come on Christmas Eve when the door was unlocked and we would behold it in its full glory, lit candles on its branches casting a soft glow on the pile of presents below.
First, however, we had to eat the Christmas meal – the one part of the whole season that held no joy for me. Naturally there were rules for the Christmas meal, and they specified that the Christmas Eve meal should be fish. (In case you’re wondering why: any animal that was at the nativity gets a free pass at Christmas and, unfortunately for fish, there was apparently no stream running past that stable.) As a child, I hated fish. Hated it with a passion. The fish I hated most of all was trout: which was exactly what my mother often cooked, usually with a nice sprinkle of toasted almonds. Just thinking about the trout to come cast a slight shadow over the entire Christmas season.
These days, our Christmas has changed in many ways. Now that we can call or email friends and relatives at any time, there is no need to send long Christmas updates. My grandmothers are no longer with us but if they were, they wouldn’t be sending Christmas parcels anymore – we can pick up many of our favourite treats at Aldi (although those domino stones fly off the shelves so fast, it’s hard to grab more than a few packets.) And it has been years since my parents have invested in the pricey indulgence of a real Christmas tree.
Some things, however, stay the same. There’s still an Advent wreath, we still celebrate on Christmas Eve, and we still have seafood for dinner – luckily, in the meantime I have learnt to love seafood. Ironically, my mother eventually grew tired of serving trout every year and these days, we usually eat bouillabaisse – a new twist on an old tradition, which brings a smile to my face. As a German, I don’t like breaking rules – but I’m all in favour of bending them every so often.
Words_ Ute Junker
Photo_ Jennifer Pallian /Unsplash