well ok, in 1 day and a week!!! Anyway, I´m sooo looking forward to it!!!
Ok, some German X-Mas Trivia!
In Germany it differs from part to part if Santa Claus (St. Nikolaus or Weihnachtsmann) brings the gifts or the Christ-child. The Christ-child was brought up as an protestant counter-part for catholic St. Nikolaus. It is mostly displayed as an angelic woman with long blonde hair. http://tintin.kulando.de/resource/elemente/download/christkind_imeinsatz.jpg
To the bad children comes Farmhand Ruprecht and gives them a spanking. Knecht Ruprecht and St. Nikolaus: http://bib1lp1.rz.tu-bs.de/docportal/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/DocPortal_derivate_00000332/00000020.jpg
Santa Clause comes with a sleigh or acompanied by a donkey. Reindeers are a purely American thing as well as elves. You won´t find any elves around.
The christmas tree is mostly in the living room and the adults shut the door of it. Children are supposed not to peek through the keyholes cause Santa or the Christ-child will pick up the presents again and disappear (but off course they try anyway)
We celebrate X-Mas at the 24rth of December in the holy night. Mostly at about 5-6 pm in the evening. All the church-bells start ringing and than you know it´s time to go into the special room.
The 4 weekends before X-Mas we have the Advent weekends where we lit candles. Originally people chamfered dring that time, but fortunetly habbits changed ;-) Each weekend we lit an additional candle. The photo displayed shows the 2nd week of Advent: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9d/Advent_wreath.jpg/793px-Advent_wreath.jpg Than we eat cookies, listen to X-MAs music, read or whatever we feel like doing. At the weekends you can also take a walk on the X-Mas markets where they build up little wooden houses in town and sell usefull, useless and handmade items. You can find the X-Mas story displayed with big figures of Josef, Maria, Baby-Jesus, shepherds, the three holy kings and sometimes even living animals (sheeps, donkeys etc). You can drink there hot spiced wine to keep warm.
There is no thing as a real traditional Christmas dish for all since all regions have different habbits. Some eat sausages with potatoe-salad, others eat fish or duck.
When my great-grandmother was a child (that was about 1909 to the 1920s) she had 7 siblings. Their parents allways told them the Christchild would be at the church-hill and give out gifts. They allways hurried, but whenever they arrived the christchild was gone already....
