<- part 2

….Then I moved in with DB.

DB is German. DB’s parents are German. All of them were born and live in [former] East Germany.

There is a lot of tradition involved in a  German Christmas, and a whole lot more in an East German one. I’m not sure why, or even if it’s the same all over the east, but that’s what I’ve noticed.

DB announced that we were going to decorate the house at the weekend. He’d been itching to do it for weeks, but you can’t start until after Totensonntag*  and we didn’t have much time to spare during the week. He ordered LED candles and repaired the Schwipbogen while he waited for Saturday to come.

What we did on Saturday can be read here.

On Sunday, I got out my box of Christmas Things. DB looked at it, looked at me, looked back at the box and back to me. “Is that it?” He asks. He can’t believe how little it is.

He set off to collect his Advent Things from around the house: under the stairs, behind the bed, in a plastic box next to the towel cupboard. The pile grew as I watched. “There you go!” He says triumphantly, “now you can decorate properly – the light-up-able baubles hang in the windows, the star goes there, that one goes…..” I tried to keep track of what went where as he rummaged though the boxes.

He had to collect something from work so I decorated the house, according to memory. I didn’t get it exactly right, but it doesn’t matter because it still looks good. We have new candles, Schwipbögen, a table cloth, various hanging glass baubles, lit up stars and tinsel.

We’re not quite finished, but there are 3 Sundays to go!

* (the last Sunday of the church year, or the last Sunday before Advent)

part 4 ->