Merry Christmas!

Once again it is Christmas, a time in the year I like very much although I have already been kicking round on this nice place for almost 51 years. Eating, drinking, reading playing computergames - in a nutshell: just beeing  lazy and rest is what I like on christmas.

I hope You all enjoy theses days as much as I do and wish You a very Happy and and Merry Christmas

Fokko

BTW: The picture  shows the Daniel the highest steeple of Noerdlingen and its landmark  Noerdlingen is about 20 miles from Aalen and a nice medieval twon with a complete city wall on which you can walk aroun the whole town. Obviously Noerdlingen is a must for Japanese tourists because you very often can see them there. And yes, the Daniel is that famous steeple whith the warder who shouts "So Gesell so" every half hour in the evening from 10 to 12.  

Christmas in Germany

Christmas in Germany is a bit different to Christman in the USA. It´s let's say quite more concentrated on the three days from December 24 to December 26. In fact,  December 25 is the day when we celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ, although we dont know on which date his real birthday is.

In former time the Christmas gift giving took place in the morning of December 25 but nowadays it has become common to bestow on Christmas Eve mostly after dark maybe at 6.00 pm or so. Most people here decorate their Christmas trees on Christmas eve although As far as I remember when I was a boy in my hometown Heidenheim some families I knew did this already on December 23 and my daughter just told me that many people nowadays here in Aalen do so too.

The time before christmas is the Advent here and starts with the new church year on the first of the last four sundays  before Christmas. We than have an Advent wreath in the house typically made of fir twigs with four candles on it. On every one of these four sundays one more candle will be lit. I dont know how many families still really celebrate these Advent Sundays in the old way, but we  do: My family and me sit together round the Advent wreath, I take a guitar and than we sing some Christmas songs and eat Christmas cookies.

Christmas than really starts on Christmas Eve. As I already mentioned, the Chrismas tree gets decorated and after nightfall or a bit later we have diner. At bottom you shouldn't eat meat than because Christmas Eve isn't already Christmas but still belongs to Advent which actually is a fasting season like Lenten Season. I guess the tradition to have fish especially carp for diner on Christmas Eve is a relict of this old rule. But nowadays many people have meat than anyway and I guess most don't know at all what it really is about Advent.

After diner comes the bestowing and after that we sit a bit together and sing christmas songs. Later - or in many families maybe immediately after the bestowing - the kids start to play with their gifts, the grown up people talk a bit and maybe drink one or another glass.

On the next day, December 25, we have a feastful meal at noon or a bit later, some people also go out for eating. Some families visit grandma and grandpa or other relatives, maybe already at noon to eat together or later, in the afternoon for coffee time.

December 25 and 26 are holydays in Germany and what we call "gesetzliche Feiertage" what could be translated as something like "legal holydays" what means that these days are work free but employers anyway have to pay their employees like they would work. New Year also is such a "gesetzlicher Feirtag", Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve are sort of half ones: You have to work in the morning but have the afternoon off but get payed for the whole day. Many people take the other halves of these days off too and also the working days between Christmas and new years eve. In some parts of Germany like here in Baden Wuerttemberg January 6, Epiphania or twelfthday also is such a payed holyday and ift possible people take off until this day ore even the rest of the week too.

Because of the good possibility to get two or even three weeks of with just a couple of vacancy days also many people in Germany go on holyday over Christmas and New Year.  Some travel to ski resorts and some into southern countries to flee the winter. Some even travel to places which are merely known as summer holyday resorts and enjoy e.g. the very special charme of the North Sea in winter.

I myself don't like to travel over Christmas. In my opinion the winter holydays are some kind of counterpart to the ones in summer: The latter are for traveling and adventure, but wintertime is a resting time and over Christmas I like to enjoy my home and sort of hibernate.               

German Game: Roe Deer

In Germany we have a small relative of the red deer which is called roe deer and does not occure in America. Red deer is practically the same as wapiti and used to live almost everywhere in Germany. But nowadays red deer ist restricted to certain areas because it does much damage to agriculture and sylviculture. If red deer appears outside these areas hunters has to shoot it unless it is a stag with the desired form of antlers.  A roe buck and a doe

The roe deer looks much like a smaller version of red deer but in fact - at least according to  the zoological systematic - it is closer related to the elk because like the latter it belongs to the telemetacarpalia and the first to the plesometacarpalia.     

Roe deer is the most common game for german hunters, only in the last years closely followed by boar. Only few hunters here can affort hunting on red deer, so roe deer ist sort of substititution for it. The roe deer is sometimes called "poor man's deer" an still some hunters are very proud if they have roebucks with big trophies in their hunting grounds.

In the former German hunting laws there used to be strict rules about shooting roe deer much like the rules for red deer, trying to produce strong trophies by preserving stags with the desired form of the antlers. Anyway, in the meantime one found out that in the case of the roe deer - unlike with the red deer -  the quality of the antlers does not much depend from  genetic endowments but merely from nourishment and other vital circumstances.

Because the roe deer looks much like a small version of the red deer many people - esp. in urban areas - believe that it was the wife of the latter. As a matter of fact, the roe deer is a species of its own.  An interesting detail of its reproduction is the fact that the fertilized ovum rests for a couple of months in the uterus of the doe (the female roe) until it starts to grow. This explains the fact that the rutting season of the roe deer is by late july and early august and the fawns ar born in may of june althozgh according to its size the roe should gestate for only six months.

Obviously this serves to shift the rutting period to summer. So after the exhausting rutting season the roe buck has enough time to recover before the winter comes with cold and shortage of food. Red deer ruts in fall and although the stags are much bigger than roe bucks they often dont survive the winter because they had not enough time to recover from the stress and exhausting rut.

German hunters traditionally shoot big game during the rutting season and although roe deer counts to the small game it is a treated a bit like it was big game - "poor man's red deer" you see...  

Unlike the hunters many modern German state forest rangers don't like roe deer very much. They consider it to be a sort of varmint ("small red forst eater") because it does much damage to the woods by nibbling off buds and sprouts of young trees. The trees dont die from this but tend to not grow properly and only deliver lumber instead of valuable timber.

By the way, Bambi the young white tail buck from the nice Disney movie originally was a roe deer.  The plot for the movie was taken from the novel "Bambi" by the Austrian author Felix salten, which tells the story of a young roe buck. 

Winter in East Wuerttemberg

Winterly Ambience: A Wayside Corss near Aalen-Unterkochen

East Wuerttemberg is sometimes called "Swabish Siberia" because it has a much less mild climate since the area around Stuttgart, the Fils Valley, the Rems Valley and some other areas which together are called the Unterland where also the famous Wuerttembergian Wine is grown. On the other hand the westmore parts of the Swabish Alb are quite a bit colder since they are situated much higher.

Großkuchen on the Haertsfeld in Winter

But sometimes we have really cold winters like the ones of 2004/2005 and 2005/2006 and the Haertsfeld and the Albuch see longer periods with snow cover almost every year.  I remember a snowy day when I was out hunting boar on the Haertsfeld with a pack of other hunters. We had been invited by the local forest authority and after the hunting was over we were sitting in an inn.

Winter in the woods of the Haertsfeld

Some of the other hunters got a mobile call from a friend in Stuttgart area and  having finished it he told us that his friend had been complainig about "lots of snow".  We asked him whether he had asked his friend how much snow they had there and he told us that they had a a bit more than one inch of it down their. We heartily laughed about the "lots of snow" in Stuttgart since when we had been out there the snow already had been about one foot high or even more and it still was snowing so that the ones of us who got 4WDs were quite glad. 

Although we often have cold winters even with much snow we quite seldom have a really White Christmas. Snow and cold typically come by the end of december or in january here.  Actually it's cold here in my area and we have a bit snow but weather report says it will become warmer and start to rain. So Chances for a White Christmas are not to good..  

An Old Woman in the Confessional

Wuerttemberg, the part of Germany where I live once used to be the Kingdom of Wuerttemberg, a protestantic country. Nevertheless the former kings seem to have been not that strict in religious things and so some parts that had belonged to monastaries or other ecclesiastic lordship remained catholic. Therefore you can still find merely catholic villages and areas in Wuerttemberg. One of these areas is the Wuerttembergian part of the Haertsfeld the eastmost part of the Swabian Alb or Swabian Jura which partly belongs to the merely catholic Bavaria although the people there are swabish.

And this is where our little story happened:

And old woman from a small village on the Haertsfeld went to church to shrive. Once in the confessional and having confessed some minor sins she took a deep breath and said:

"Very Reverend Father, I once seduced a young man..."

The priest was shocked: "But Ma'am... In your age?"

The old woman: "Oh, this happened 50 years ago but I still enjoy so much to confess it!"     

Climategate nearly ignored in Germany

Right before the climate summit at Kopenhagen some hackers cracked computers at the CRU (Climate Research Unit) University of East Anglia and downloaded a lot of compromising material as emails and computer programs which they published for a short time on a website. Because a lot of people took the stuff themselves and uploaded it onto other websites now everyone can have a look themselves at the really funny emails the climate "scientists" wrote each other and also on partly very odd pieces of computer software. Like the stuff Michael Mann used to create hockey sticks out of nearly every bunch of temperature data some of the programs where designed to make nice curves even from temperatures which didnt really fit the climate guys' wishes.

As the Stuff from the CRU was published it was widely disscussed on blogs in Europa and the US and it even made it into som MSM at least in America. But in Germany MSM nearly totally ignored the case. Only a very small number of German MSM even mentioned it, strongly placating it.  Only SPON (Spiegel Online) published a somewath more honest atircle which nevertheless vanished from the site very quick and was replaced by new and even more horrible news about what global warming would do to our planet and us.