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olorielYet again, there would have been so much to talk about last month, but the posts didn't happen. But as picspams always seem a good way of remembering stuff and rambling about it, I'll do a holiday picspam! While the holiday season isn't entirely over yet, so this is still relevant! That way, we'll also catch up with the kids? I hope?
(Pics are f-locked, so if you can't see them, that may be why.)
So, let's begin at the start of the season, or rather, re-capping the holiday before that, which is at any rate where I last mentioned the State of teh Flixster, I believe.
The famous princess lantern (along with last year's fox and the year before last year's cat lantern). SPARKLE ALL THE WAY. I left them hanging in the living room until it was time to put up the tree, which by our regional custom isn't until immediately before Christmas. (Historically and in theory, the tree Apparates, fully decorated, in your living-room either on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, by way of The Christ Child or Father Christmas, along with the presents. In my childhood, that meant that the living-room was locked from Dec. 23rd onwards, which is not feasible in our house (living-room and dining-room are the same, and there is no room for dining in the kitchen). I suppose the custom made more sense when homes still had a "good parlour" that was only used on holidays anyway. At any rate, the kids love decorating the tree. So in our family, Mommy puts up the tree on December 23rd and then we decorate it more or less together.)
But I am getting ahead of myself! Here, it's still November or early December.
December 6th - St. Nicolas (Santa Clause) came and left some goodies! Another custom I may have to explain to half the f-list. Sooo, on his saint day, St. Nicolas comes and drops off goodies for "nice children" who left a clean (!) boot out by the door. (In some regions, you apparently use a plate, but here, it's boots). Naughty children get a birch rod instead. As spanking is illegal (and was when I was a kid, too), this has been a purely symbolic gesture for decades; actually, I have no clue whether it's still kept up generally. Probably not? I dunno. I have always hated the birch rod custom anyway, because following her own childhood custom, my mom always tied the goodies to a birch rod, reasoning that we weren't terribly naughty but not perfectly nice either, so we sorta deserved both. Fair enough, but nobody else did this (or at any rate, none of my childhood friends would admit it! Maybe we were just too honest!). So we always had to explain ourselves and got looked at sideways. SO HUMILIATING, FOLKS. We later learned to lie and not mention the rod, of course. Well done, Santy!
Anyway, our kids got some play-doh, some fruit and some nuts. And no birch rod. No big toy sets, either, though. In a few years, they'll probably find an orange and an apple from Santy as humiliating as I found my sweets-tied-to-a-birch-rod back in the day because EVERYBODY ELSE GOT LEGO/ A TABLET COMPUTER/ A NEW BIKE, WOE IS ME! We're an old-fashioned family, I guess. :P
St. Nicolas/Santa Clause is not to be confused with Father Christmas, of course! ;)
At some point, Felix complained that we "didn't have our home properly decorated at all" but I think I did okay. Considering that our home continues to be a construction site, anyway. I mean, we had all the necessaries like the wreath and the Saint Barbara twigs (yeah, lots of saint customs for a Lutheran region! Sue us!) and some optionals like angels and plenty of stars and a nativity pyramid.
The pyramid invites me to take another trip down memory lane. This used to be my parents' Christmas pyramid from as early as I can remember. We kids loved it, it was so fascinating how the warmth of the candles made the carousel turn. Unfortunately, it didn't turn particularly well after a while because the driveshaft sits on a little glass support and that was broken. It was Generally Known (TM) that it was impossible to replace that glass support because you just couldn't get them. Years later, at a Christmas market, my parents bought a new pyramid and told the story of the broken glass support! "Oh, you mean these?" quoth the pyramid-seller and produced a whole handful. Nobody had taken into account that once Germany was Reunified, getting pyramid driveshaft glass supports from The East was no longer a problem!
Anyway, so the old pyramid is now working again. But my parents have already bought a new one. Accordingly, we inherited the old pyramid. The turning carousel is still fascinating for today's kids, too.
OK, back to the present. This pic really sums up Felix' kindergarten development nicely. He took part in their nativity play! With, like, lines to say and everything! Mind you, it wasn't a big play and he didn't perform particularly well - missed his cue and preferred to read his lines, and then recited them at such speed that you could barely understand them. But the mere fact that he took part in the pageant at all, and didn't run away or throw a tantrum after having missed his cue, is such a big thing for us. Felix hates having an audience. Audiences are unpredictable things and it's so embarrassing if you goof up in front of them. I really, really sympathise because I was and still am suffering from severe fear of failure in front of strangers (or even non-strangers, really). I acquired this only later in life (IIRC, I used to bask in the limelight in kindergarten and elementary school! But grades 5 through 7 were unkind!), but Felix is already terrified of doing something wrong when someone is watching. Is it his high level of self-awareness or the experience of the old kindergarten? Who knows! Anyway, he was supposed to be "on stage" during the Thanksgiving service in October (which also happened to be his fifth baptism anniversary. That is getting celebrated these days!), first to leave Noah's Ark pretending to be one of two elephants, and later to hear his baptismal motto read out again. No big deal, you might think! I certainly thought so! But everyone's eyes on him were enough to make him crumble completely. He managed to get out of the cardboard ark - by clinging to the other "elephant", which was kind of cute - but when it was time to go to the font with the other anniversary kids (not all by himself!), he didn't want to stay at all. I had to hold him in my arms to get him through it. (He is not yet aware that a five-year-old who needs to climb into Mommy's lap in front of the whole congregation is actually far more embarrassing than anything else he could have done wrong!) -- So yeah, massive stage fright. Two months later, he felt safe enough to go through with the kindergarten pageant. In spite of the audience. Major achievement! So grateful to his new teachers. I hope we can build on that. I know how paralysing this can be, and how much you have to perform in front of audiences in later life. >_>
Also, fun observation: The muslim moms in the audience had no qualms whatsoever about singing along to the Christmas carols. A lot of German parents very pointedly kept their mouths shut. (I'm not for forcing anyone to sing along to Christmas carols! It was just interesting to observe who apparently feels offended, and who apparently doesn't mind! Just sayin'.)
Lighting a candle on grandma's grave. I don't go there often (it's an hour's drive, one direction) but the Advent season is among the occasions when it feels necessary.
Thanks to Abney and Teal on the CBeeBies bedtime hour, Felix got really excited about the prospect of looking for "The Perfect Tree". He's been re-enacting that episode all last winter already, so this year I figured I should take him along to our uphill neighbours' plantation to choose our tree. Mr. B. has been talking about giving up the Christmas tree growing for years so the number of eligible trees is getting smaller and smaller (and my hopes of buying the plantation off him to use it as an orchard have been growing bigger), but as the former horse paddocks up the hill have now turned into a new suburb, there are lots of new customers who just love to buy their Christmas tree a short walk down the hill, locally sourced and all! So now Mr. B. is motivated to renew his plantation again. Oh well! We'll see how that works out. Anyway, we managed to find a tree that suited my tastes - not too tall, but reasonably dense. And Mr. B. cut it and delivered it on the 23rd.
Naturally, Felix wanted to start decorating right away.
As I said, this is normally the privilege of The Christ Child/ Father Christmas (i.e., the parents), but as my parents reasoned when I was a kid: Those entities have so much to do, they can use a little help! It's just too much fun to decorate the tree together. For the same reason, we "help the Easter Bunny" by letting the kids dye a few eggs themselves. I'm fond enough of these traditions to tell the stories while the kids are willing to believe them, but not fond enough to forego the joys of collectively preparing stuff!
Ready for the gift exchange. Holy moly, what a heap of gifts. (For and by eight people, but let's be honest, most of it is for the kids. >_>)
The regional paper's (Rheinische Post = Rhine-Area Mail) Christmas Special. Classy! In all honesty, I really only still have a newspaper subscription out of a sense of duty, not out of actual interest or enjoyment. If it's important, I'll find out online. But the "Roman Mail" was really neat and sort of justified the entire year's subscription! I love all the little details that you probably can't see in the photo, like the date ("Saturnalia, DCCLIII ab urbe condita") or the weather forecast ("Bethlehem: slightly cloudy in the morning"). And, well, I'm not gonna translate all the headlines unless anyone is actually interested. But anyway: Well played! And it only cost a single sestertius, too!
Lyrics sheet from the Christmas Eve service. It was a very contemporary service, focusing on the migrational/refugee aspects of the nativity story. As always (sigh), the nativity play was far too long-winded. Have to admit that I'm only attending this particular service out of a sense of duty, too. Looking forward to the time when the kids are old enough to do the midnight spectacular instead.
The next day, at my parents' place. Felix, apparently re-enacting the nativity play from the day before. He always acts like he isn't listening (and certainly not comprehending a thing), but later you'll notice that he actually heard quite a bit. School is going to be so much fun, you gals. *sigh*
Some loot. The box contains my Christmas present (+ last two birthdays present) from Jörg, a funnel and sieve set for melting and purifying used wax from my hives. In spite of having only two proper colonies, I have amassed quite a bit of dirty wax in the past years because it's such a pain to borrow a wax funnel, even if you need it only once a year. Because almost everyone in the local beekeeping society is 70 years old, anal retentive, and convinced that you have to explain the entire theory of beekeeping to a youngster every single time she needs the society's equipment. Well, now I have my own! Take that, fussy beekeeping society people! Julian is convinced, of course, that the box is the actual gift. He's rather like a cat in that way. -- Jörg has been talking for years about how he'd love to try brewing his own beer, so I got him a home brewery kit. He probably has all the equipment from his days of studying chemistry, anyway, but you know how hard it is to start if you have to search for everything first. So now he's got it all in one box, complete with malt and hops and stuff. Looking forward to brewing our own! -- Felix absolutely wanted to have one of those wooden Waldorf playhouses but they're madly expensive. (Probably made from moon-cut wood. Do you have moon-cut wood in the English-speaking world, or is this a specifically Central European obsession? :P) So Jörg built one from ordinary DIY wood in his two work-free days before Christmas. Then, of course, Felix was disappointed (it doesn't look like it did in the Waldorf catalogue!) and ignored it at first. He uses it by now - dragged in boxes and toys and re-built his ball path around it - but of course he can't appreciate the effort. Well duh, he didn't see the effort!
We didn't go on a New Year's hike, we did an Old Year's hike instead. (Hence also the photo I used for my New Year's post, of course.) Julian was actually way too tired when we set out (we'd planned to leave him with the MIL, but he insisted on coming along! Having to nap is cruel and unusual!), but he managed to hold up admirably and walked quite far. I had to carry him all the way back, though. He's quite heavy by now. :P
This is what we woke up to this morning! Winter has come, hurrah!
Oof! Quite a lot of text for a picspam. I clearly should have done that photo-a-day meme that was going around my f-list in December. At least in a modified photo-a-week kind of way. A resolution for this year, perhaps? I clearly find it easier to talk about RL stuff when I have a pic to show with it. Hm. Must ponder this. But for now, we're done!
(Pics are f-locked, so if you can't see them, that may be why.)
So, let's begin at the start of the season, or rather, re-capping the holiday before that, which is at any rate where I last mentioned the State of teh Flixster, I believe.
The famous princess lantern (along with last year's fox and the year before last year's cat lantern). SPARKLE ALL THE WAY. I left them hanging in the living room until it was time to put up the tree, which by our regional custom isn't until immediately before Christmas. (Historically and in theory, the tree Apparates, fully decorated, in your living-room either on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, by way of The Christ Child or Father Christmas, along with the presents. In my childhood, that meant that the living-room was locked from Dec. 23rd onwards, which is not feasible in our house (living-room and dining-room are the same, and there is no room for dining in the kitchen). I suppose the custom made more sense when homes still had a "good parlour" that was only used on holidays anyway. At any rate, the kids love decorating the tree. So in our family, Mommy puts up the tree on December 23rd and then we decorate it more or less together.)
But I am getting ahead of myself! Here, it's still November or early December.
December 6th - St. Nicolas (Santa Clause) came and left some goodies! Another custom I may have to explain to half the f-list. Sooo, on his saint day, St. Nicolas comes and drops off goodies for "nice children" who left a clean (!) boot out by the door. (In some regions, you apparently use a plate, but here, it's boots). Naughty children get a birch rod instead. As spanking is illegal (and was when I was a kid, too), this has been a purely symbolic gesture for decades; actually, I have no clue whether it's still kept up generally. Probably not? I dunno. I have always hated the birch rod custom anyway, because following her own childhood custom, my mom always tied the goodies to a birch rod, reasoning that we weren't terribly naughty but not perfectly nice either, so we sorta deserved both. Fair enough, but nobody else did this (or at any rate, none of my childhood friends would admit it! Maybe we were just too honest!). So we always had to explain ourselves and got looked at sideways. SO HUMILIATING, FOLKS. We later learned to lie and not mention the rod, of course. Well done, Santy!
Anyway, our kids got some play-doh, some fruit and some nuts. And no birch rod. No big toy sets, either, though. In a few years, they'll probably find an orange and an apple from Santy as humiliating as I found my sweets-tied-to-a-birch-rod back in the day because EVERYBODY ELSE GOT LEGO/ A TABLET COMPUTER/ A NEW BIKE, WOE IS ME! We're an old-fashioned family, I guess. :P
St. Nicolas/Santa Clause is not to be confused with Father Christmas, of course! ;)
At some point, Felix complained that we "didn't have our home properly decorated at all" but I think I did okay. Considering that our home continues to be a construction site, anyway. I mean, we had all the necessaries like the wreath and the Saint Barbara twigs (yeah, lots of saint customs for a Lutheran region! Sue us!) and some optionals like angels and plenty of stars and a nativity pyramid.
The pyramid invites me to take another trip down memory lane. This used to be my parents' Christmas pyramid from as early as I can remember. We kids loved it, it was so fascinating how the warmth of the candles made the carousel turn. Unfortunately, it didn't turn particularly well after a while because the driveshaft sits on a little glass support and that was broken. It was Generally Known (TM) that it was impossible to replace that glass support because you just couldn't get them. Years later, at a Christmas market, my parents bought a new pyramid and told the story of the broken glass support! "Oh, you mean these?" quoth the pyramid-seller and produced a whole handful. Nobody had taken into account that once Germany was Reunified, getting pyramid driveshaft glass supports from The East was no longer a problem!
Anyway, so the old pyramid is now working again. But my parents have already bought a new one. Accordingly, we inherited the old pyramid. The turning carousel is still fascinating for today's kids, too.
OK, back to the present. This pic really sums up Felix' kindergarten development nicely. He took part in their nativity play! With, like, lines to say and everything! Mind you, it wasn't a big play and he didn't perform particularly well - missed his cue and preferred to read his lines, and then recited them at such speed that you could barely understand them. But the mere fact that he took part in the pageant at all, and didn't run away or throw a tantrum after having missed his cue, is such a big thing for us. Felix hates having an audience. Audiences are unpredictable things and it's so embarrassing if you goof up in front of them. I really, really sympathise because I was and still am suffering from severe fear of failure in front of strangers (or even non-strangers, really). I acquired this only later in life (IIRC, I used to bask in the limelight in kindergarten and elementary school! But grades 5 through 7 were unkind!), but Felix is already terrified of doing something wrong when someone is watching. Is it his high level of self-awareness or the experience of the old kindergarten? Who knows! Anyway, he was supposed to be "on stage" during the Thanksgiving service in October (which also happened to be his fifth baptism anniversary. That is getting celebrated these days!), first to leave Noah's Ark pretending to be one of two elephants, and later to hear his baptismal motto read out again. No big deal, you might think! I certainly thought so! But everyone's eyes on him were enough to make him crumble completely. He managed to get out of the cardboard ark - by clinging to the other "elephant", which was kind of cute - but when it was time to go to the font with the other anniversary kids (not all by himself!), he didn't want to stay at all. I had to hold him in my arms to get him through it. (He is not yet aware that a five-year-old who needs to climb into Mommy's lap in front of the whole congregation is actually far more embarrassing than anything else he could have done wrong!) -- So yeah, massive stage fright. Two months later, he felt safe enough to go through with the kindergarten pageant. In spite of the audience. Major achievement! So grateful to his new teachers. I hope we can build on that. I know how paralysing this can be, and how much you have to perform in front of audiences in later life. >_>
Also, fun observation: The muslim moms in the audience had no qualms whatsoever about singing along to the Christmas carols. A lot of German parents very pointedly kept their mouths shut. (I'm not for forcing anyone to sing along to Christmas carols! It was just interesting to observe who apparently feels offended, and who apparently doesn't mind! Just sayin'.)
Lighting a candle on grandma's grave. I don't go there often (it's an hour's drive, one direction) but the Advent season is among the occasions when it feels necessary.
Thanks to Abney and Teal on the CBeeBies bedtime hour, Felix got really excited about the prospect of looking for "The Perfect Tree". He's been re-enacting that episode all last winter already, so this year I figured I should take him along to our uphill neighbours' plantation to choose our tree. Mr. B. has been talking about giving up the Christmas tree growing for years so the number of eligible trees is getting smaller and smaller (and my hopes of buying the plantation off him to use it as an orchard have been growing bigger), but as the former horse paddocks up the hill have now turned into a new suburb, there are lots of new customers who just love to buy their Christmas tree a short walk down the hill, locally sourced and all! So now Mr. B. is motivated to renew his plantation again. Oh well! We'll see how that works out. Anyway, we managed to find a tree that suited my tastes - not too tall, but reasonably dense. And Mr. B. cut it and delivered it on the 23rd.
Naturally, Felix wanted to start decorating right away.
As I said, this is normally the privilege of The Christ Child/ Father Christmas (i.e., the parents), but as my parents reasoned when I was a kid: Those entities have so much to do, they can use a little help! It's just too much fun to decorate the tree together. For the same reason, we "help the Easter Bunny" by letting the kids dye a few eggs themselves. I'm fond enough of these traditions to tell the stories while the kids are willing to believe them, but not fond enough to forego the joys of collectively preparing stuff!
Ready for the gift exchange. Holy moly, what a heap of gifts. (For and by eight people, but let's be honest, most of it is for the kids. >_>)
The regional paper's (Rheinische Post = Rhine-Area Mail) Christmas Special. Classy! In all honesty, I really only still have a newspaper subscription out of a sense of duty, not out of actual interest or enjoyment. If it's important, I'll find out online. But the "Roman Mail" was really neat and sort of justified the entire year's subscription! I love all the little details that you probably can't see in the photo, like the date ("Saturnalia, DCCLIII ab urbe condita") or the weather forecast ("Bethlehem: slightly cloudy in the morning"). And, well, I'm not gonna translate all the headlines unless anyone is actually interested. But anyway: Well played! And it only cost a single sestertius, too!
Lyrics sheet from the Christmas Eve service. It was a very contemporary service, focusing on the migrational/refugee aspects of the nativity story. As always (sigh), the nativity play was far too long-winded. Have to admit that I'm only attending this particular service out of a sense of duty, too. Looking forward to the time when the kids are old enough to do the midnight spectacular instead.
The next day, at my parents' place. Felix, apparently re-enacting the nativity play from the day before. He always acts like he isn't listening (and certainly not comprehending a thing), but later you'll notice that he actually heard quite a bit. School is going to be so much fun, you gals. *sigh*
Some loot. The box contains my Christmas present (+ last two birthdays present) from Jörg, a funnel and sieve set for melting and purifying used wax from my hives. In spite of having only two proper colonies, I have amassed quite a bit of dirty wax in the past years because it's such a pain to borrow a wax funnel, even if you need it only once a year. Because almost everyone in the local beekeeping society is 70 years old, anal retentive, and convinced that you have to explain the entire theory of beekeeping to a youngster every single time she needs the society's equipment. Well, now I have my own! Take that, fussy beekeeping society people! Julian is convinced, of course, that the box is the actual gift. He's rather like a cat in that way. -- Jörg has been talking for years about how he'd love to try brewing his own beer, so I got him a home brewery kit. He probably has all the equipment from his days of studying chemistry, anyway, but you know how hard it is to start if you have to search for everything first. So now he's got it all in one box, complete with malt and hops and stuff. Looking forward to brewing our own! -- Felix absolutely wanted to have one of those wooden Waldorf playhouses but they're madly expensive. (Probably made from moon-cut wood. Do you have moon-cut wood in the English-speaking world, or is this a specifically Central European obsession? :P) So Jörg built one from ordinary DIY wood in his two work-free days before Christmas. Then, of course, Felix was disappointed (it doesn't look like it did in the Waldorf catalogue!) and ignored it at first. He uses it by now - dragged in boxes and toys and re-built his ball path around it - but of course he can't appreciate the effort. Well duh, he didn't see the effort!
We didn't go on a New Year's hike, we did an Old Year's hike instead. (Hence also the photo I used for my New Year's post, of course.) Julian was actually way too tired when we set out (we'd planned to leave him with the MIL, but he insisted on coming along! Having to nap is cruel and unusual!), but he managed to hold up admirably and walked quite far. I had to carry him all the way back, though. He's quite heavy by now. :P
This is what we woke up to this morning! Winter has come, hurrah!
Oof! Quite a lot of text for a picspam. I clearly should have done that photo-a-day meme that was going around my f-list in December. At least in a modified photo-a-week kind of way. A resolution for this year, perhaps? I clearly find it easier to talk about RL stuff when I have a pic to show with it. Hm. Must ponder this. But for now, we're done!
