THE CHARM OF MERRY GERMANY

Christmas in Berlin: Andrew Gimson is told

it's not the done thing to go to a Christmas

market — fortunately, after going to one

MY FRIEND Frau Kunigunde Hagen- meyer kindly took it upon herself to tell me, an ignorant foreigner, the proper way to celebrate Christmas in Germany. She is by profession a teacher of Latin and Greek, was brought up in Hanover but has lived in Hamburg since 1957.

`Our big day is Christmas Eve,' she said. 'Families usually go to church in the early afternoon, if they have small children, and either have their presents immediately, and then their big meal, or vice versa. The tradi- tion is to eat blue carp — you pour hot vine- gar over it before cooking, which turns it blue — with a sauce made out of sour cream, horseradish and apples. The presents can be either wrapped or unwrapped.

'We don't wrap ours. In my house, we stand outside in the hall while my husband lights the wax candles on the Christmas tree, and then we go in and sing carols round the tree, where the presents are, and the children have to recite poems they have learned by heart. It's quite a solemn time. I remember from my own childhood days, each of us four children had to play a musical instrument, and I was so moved when I played the piano that I cried and I couldn't see the music.

`Nowadays my son Moritz plays the trumpet. In families where they don't make music, they play records of baroque music with trumpet or flute. There's quite a holy atmosphere. People suddenly remember they've been brought up as what one might call Christmas Christians.

`Then we sit up to the early hours and play games.'

`What sort of games?' I asked, sensing the chance to pick up a genuine piece of old German folklore.

`What's it called, that one from England where you ask each other questions?'

`Not Trivial Pursuit?'

`Yes. Trivial Pursuit. And the children play with their new toys. We don't have Christmas stockings in Germany. Instead, on the night before St Nicholas's day, 6 December, each child puts out a shoe — it used to be on the window-sill but now it's outside the bedroom door — and if the child has been good, St Nicholas fills it with sweets, and if bad, he leaves a birch. `On the first day of Christmas, we have a roast goose filled with apples and currants, and red cabbage. Of course, every family has its special little customs. On the after- noon of Christmas Eve, my husband and I walk to his mother's grave. His father fell in the war, and she always spent Christmas with us until five years ago, when she died, and now I take two Christmas baubles from the tree and fasten them on her grave, and take them away again on Three Kings' Day, the sixth of January, when you also have to get rid of your tree.

`This decorating of the grave is not a nor- mal thing to do, but I've noticed in the last few years when we walk through the ceme- tery that many people have started putting fairy lights on the graves. The only other place I've seen anything like that is in Bavaria, which of course is Roman Catholic.'

Mention of lights emboldened me to ask about one of the most conspicuous, and to my mind delightful, of modern German customs: the placing of illuminated deco- rations in the windows of flats and houses, which begins just before Advent Sunday. Our neighbours in east Berlin, who have three children, have coloured lights in every window, many of which flash on and off, as well as a string of plain white lights running through the heathers on the para- pet of their balcony. The whole effect is extremely cheering as one returns home on a cold winter's night, and I have been wondering what to get for our windows, in order to show that we Britons can enter into the Christmas spirit too.

But Frau Hagenmeyer is strongly opposed to lights, regarding them as work- ing-class. 'You see them in blocks of flats,' she said. 'It's common. That's what I think' She is also against the Christmas markets which spring up all over Germany from the beginning of Advent. 'They're a totally arti- ficial, commercial creation,' she declared. `You find so many things there made in Tai- wan. And I don't like Gliihwein [mulled wine]. That's a commercial thing too. In cold weather you see it being sold from trolleys along the River Elbe. For my family, Gliih- wein is something vulgar. I don't like the smell of it, and it isn't done to drink it.'

So much for the nonsensical idea firmly believed by many Germans — that their country has abolished class distinc- tions. Fortunately, I only consulted Frau Hagenmeyer after Advent Sunday, when my wife and I took our three-week-old daughter Eliza to the Christmas market in Spandau; so we were untroubled by the thought that what we were doing was vul- gar. Nor did the thousands and thousands of other families there seem worried.

The great attraction of these Christmas markets is actually that they are vulgar. In Spandau, 500 stalls and a 6,000-metre-long chain of lights have been set up, occupying ten streets and four squares of the pretty old town. The stalls sell roast Thuringian sausages, Advent wreaths, Christmas deco- rations made from every conceivable com- bination of candles, evergreen foliage and gaudy baubles, Christmas pyramids (wood- en constructions decorated with foliage and candles, which can take the place of a tree, though most Germans regard a tree as indispensable; or else layered wooden dec- orations which revolve as the heat from candles hits a vane above, on the same principle as our angel chimes), Stollen cakes from Dresden, roast chestnuts, gin- gerbread, carved and painted wooden toys such as the Nutcracker soldier figure, made to traditional folk designs from the Erzge- birge, the picturesque hills south of Dres- den, though cheaper examples are nowadays manufactured on the Pacific rim.

And about every fifth stall was selling mugs of delicious, steaming Gliihwein, smelling of cloves, with a shot of schnapps in a small glass to improve the effect.

Nacht' and 'I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas' played over loudspeakers. Small children were reciting poems to Father Christmas on a stage. One child sang '0 Tannenbaum, 0 Tannenbaum'.

The Christmas crib was said to have live animals in it, but we never got that far. We also missed the roundabout. Instead we found ourselves in Reformation Square, out- side St Nicholas's Church, where a statue commemorates the crossing over in that church, on 1 November 1539, of Joachim, Elector of Brandenburg, to the Protestant faith.

Earlier in the day, I heard a Protestant pastor express the view that only with God's help can we resist the commercialisation of Christmas. But the charm of the German Christmas is that although the churches are fuller than in Britain, many of the celebra- tions are quite unabashedly pagan. Merry Germany is similar, in spirit, to Merry Eng- land, a place of eating, drinking and singing, of folksy inelegance, inordinate sentimentali- ty, and boundless good cheer.