Most of what a German family does in December happens on a fixed date. Not roughly in the second week, not whenever people get around to it. On the day. If you are invited into a German home over the holidays, knowing the schedule is the difference between watching a ritual and taking part in one.
The four-week framework this all sits inside is on my page about German Christmas. What follows is what actually gets done.
December 4, and a Branch in a Vase
Saint Barbara’s day. In Catholic regions, especially in Bavaria and Franconia, people cut a branch from a cherry tree, sometimes plum or forsythia, and put it in water indoors. If it works, the thing blooms on Christmas Eve, white blossom in the middle of a dark month.
The legend behind it says Barbara caught her dress on a branch on her way to prison, kept it in a cup of water, and it flowered on the day she died.
Here is the part that gets left out of the pretty version: it only works if there has already been a hard frost. The buds need cold before warmth means anything to them. In a mild autumn the branch sits there for three weeks doing nothing, which is why half the people who try it once never try it again. Country wisdom also read the blossom as an oracle for next year’s harvest, and unmarried women read it for something else entirely.
The Kitchen Runs the Advent Weeks
Baking is not a nice extra here, it is the main activity of the season. Plätzchen come in named types that families defend with some heat: Vanillekipferl, crescents buried in vanilla sugar; Zimtsterne, cinnamon stars with a meringue top that cracks if you overbake them by two minutes; Spekulatius, thin, spiced, and pressed with a carved mold. Tins get filled, hidden, and raided.
Stollen is a different operation. The heavy fruit loaf gets baked weeks ahead and then left alone to mature, because it needs the time, and the version from Dresden carries a protected name that only bakeries in and around the city may use. If somebody hands you a slice in mid-December, it was made in November.
Gingerbread splits along regional lines too. Nuremberg has the famous Lebkuchen, baked on thin wafers, and Pulsnitz in Saxony turns out its own Pfefferkuchen with barely anybody outside the region noticing. Both travel well from the Christmas markets, and the rest of what lands on the table sits on my page about German food.
The Tree Comes In Late
This one catches out American visitors more than anything else. The tree does not go up at the start of December. In a lot of households it comes into the living room on December 24 itself, gets decorated that afternoon behind a closed door, and the children are kept out until the evening.
Plenty of families now put it up a few days earlier. The closed door has held on anyway.
Real wax candles are still common, clipped to the branches, with a bucket of water standing somewhere nearby and one adult whose entire job that evening is watching them. The fire brigades put out the same warning every year and we light them anyway.
In Catholic homes the nativity scene goes up gradually through Advent, and it is staged rather than placed. The manger stays empty until the 24th. The three kings start somewhere across the room, on a shelf or a windowsill, and move closer every few days until they arrive on January 6. Households where nobody has seen the inside of a church in years still do this, which tells you something about how a custom outlives the belief that carried it. More on that shift is on my page about religion in Germany.
What Happens When the Bell Rings
On the evening of the 24th, somebody rings a small bell. That is the signal that the living room is open, and it is the moment the whole month has been building toward.
What comes next is not a free-for-all with wrapping paper. There is singing first, in some households the youngest children recite a poem they have been practicing for weeks, and only then does anybody touch a package. Children who grew up with this remember the waiting more clearly than the presents.
The carol almost everyone reaches for is Stille Nacht. Which is Austrian, not German: a priest named Joseph Mohr wrote the words in the Salzburg region in 1816, an organist called Franz Xaver Gruber set them to music, and the two performed it with a guitar in a small church at Oberndorf on Christmas Eve of 1818. We sing it as though we invented it.
Later that night comes Christmette, the midnight service, the one occasion of the year when churches that stand half empty in June have people standing at the back. Earlier in the day the Krippenspiel fills those same churches with small shepherds in bathrobes.
Then there is a custom from the stretch of country between the Allgäu and the Danube that deserves wider adoption. It is called Christbaumloben, tree praising. You call on a neighbor, you look at their tree, you praise it in the most extravagant terms you can manage, and the household is then obliged to hand you a schnapps. A good decorator can expect a busy evening. :-)
The Chalk Above the Door
Roast goose belongs to the 25th, not to Christmas Eve, and it is the meal that takes real work. Duck does the job in smaller households, carp turns up in parts of the south and east, and the leftovers carry the family through the 26th.
Before all that, on December 21, comes Thomastag, the shortest day. Hardly anyone marks it now, but the old joke survives in places: whoever sleeps in or turns up last gets called the Thomasesel, the Thomas donkey, for the rest of the day. ;-)
The season closes on January 6. Children dressed as the three kings, one carrying a star on a pole, go house to house singing and collecting for children’s charities, and this is not a small operation. It is the largest children’s fundraising campaign in the world. Before they leave they chalk a line above your door: the year, three crosses, and the letters C, M, and B.
Ask what the letters mean and you will be told, quite firmly, that they stand for Christus mansionem benedicat, Christ bless this house, and definitely not for Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. That correction has become its own half-truth. Older folklore does read the letters as the kings’ initials, the Latin blessing turns up in the record only from the middle of the last century, and in parts of Bavaria people write K+M+B instead, which fits Kaspar rather better than it fits anything in Latin. Both readings have been true for somebody.
The chalk stays up all year, fading by degrees over the doorframe, until the next set of children arrives to write it again.