Oh, the joys of Christmas feasting! Turkey with all
the trimmings, pumpkin and apple pies, fudge and cookies in all kinds and
shapes, eggnog and chocolates!
In Germany, when I was a carnival child, the foods
were different, but the joy was all the same.
***
By the time late October came around we settled down
for the winter. Vati’s little Deutz truck tuckered into the chosen location.
Vati moved our home caravan to the most sheltered spot under the threshing
roof, or wherever else we wintered that year, and connected the electricity.
And we children got ready to attend school regularly for a few months.
December started with the advent calendar. Mutti always
bought one at the end of November. Behind the little windows, tiny pictures of
toys waited to be discovered day by day, and we children fought over who would
open one every morning.
On the night of December 5th, Mutti
didn’t need to remind us to shine our boots. Saint Nicklaus would come in the
night and place goodies into one shoe or boot for every child. He might also
bring some coals for the more naughty child, so we all did our best to be good
the whole day on December 5th.
In the morning, we jumped out of bed, not heeding
the freezing cold, and slipped into our clothes before running through the
living room compartment, where Mutti and Vati slept on the pull-out sofa, to
inspect our treasures.
I grabbed my boot and pulled out a tangerine and an
apple, and under them I spied a handful of mixed nuts, still in their shells. I
shook them onto the kitchen table, next to my sister’s treasures, and found a
piece of hard candy among the nuts! Hurriedly I ate my buttered roll and drank
my breakfast milk, put on my coat and stuffed my nuts and the candy into my
coat pockets.
“I’ll keep the fruit for you, children, until you’re
back from school,” Mutti said and shooed us on our way.
The apple and tangerine made a wonderful snack after
school.
A week before Christmas, Mutti baked a Stollen, a kind of dry, yeasty Christmas
bread with candied fruit. I came home from school and could smell the sweet
smell of baking. But we couldn’t eat it until the next day, since it had to sit
and age. We had Stollen slices with
margarine for breakfast and often for supper, until it was gone.
A few days later, I came home from school and could
already smell the wonderful scent of baking cookies before I opened the door.
The kitchen table was dusty with flour on which Mutti had rolled out a sugar
cookie dough. She cut out shapes with her old cookie cutters and placed cookies
in the shape of stars, bells, and Santa Claus on a cookie sheet, while another
baked in the oven, as I could smell. Mutti pulled one sheet of cookies from the
oven and placed the other one in. she allowed us to each have one cookie, and
the rest she wrapped in butcher paper and stowed them in the highest closet in
the kitchen, for Christmas, as she told us. We never frosted the cookies. They
appeared again on our goodies plate on Christmas Eve, when we received our presents
from the Christ child.
As I grew older, Mutti added some Marzipan and
chocolate to our goodies plate, but when we were little, we probably couldn’t
afford such delicacies, since our money had to last until spring, when the
carnival circuit started again.
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