Weihnachtsman is Coming to Town

Now that Christmas is looming, Berlin is filled with outdoor Christmas markets - Wiehnachtsmarkts - a six-week city-wide (region-wide) crafts fair and food fest, with ice rinks set up in the concrete plazas, even a sledding hill with a snow-making machine at one of them. There are pony rides, donkeys and reindeer to pet, sled-dogs who pull people in a wheeled contraption, children's trains, carousels, swings and huge ferris wheels, the kind with cabins instead of open bench seats. Think Vienna. Think "The Third Man". There are musicians, carolers, storytellers, nativity scenes, and giant-sized twirling wooden pyramids with carved figures going around and around in the breeze. As at home, the city trees are picked out in little white lights so it sparkles at night. Fortunately, there is not a single inflatable Frosty the Snowman to be seen.

The craft stalls range from hand-felted hats and slippers and amusing garlands of flowers to woodcarvings, jewelry, pottery and leather goods. In one, an Orthodox nun sells tacky reproductions of icons; in another is a blacksmith making iron hooks. There are Peruvians selling handknit sweaters and mittens and jewelry made from seashells. There are rows of patterned wax candles from Swaziland, soapstone items from Kenya, the ubiquitous wooden cats-on-chairs from Indonesia, eggshell mosaic bamboo bowls from Vietnam. My favorites are the few stalls run by individual craftspeople rather than the ones selling the mass-produced items, but even the mass-produced objects have a certain charm - the traditional German painted wooden ornaments and toys, the mechanical wind-up Santas and ducks, the beautiful leather gloves in more colors than I would ever need (but I covet every single one).

Being a collector, it is hard to pass up making a few purchases for myself, although I must be mindful of the eventual return trip home and the packing it will require. To make that a little less onerous, I am attempting to accumulate only small things, and to that end my Santa Claus collection now includes a tiny wooden Wiehnachtsman in a walnut shell case, and one in an impossibly tiny matchbox toyshop. I have also purchased a second walnut-shell piece, this one with a nativity scene and a tiny propeller on top to spin it around, to expand my over-the-top nacimiento display.

My favorite acquisition so far, however, is a nativity scene made in an old prayer book binding. I met the artist, an older gentleman from Austria, who uses tiny molds to make figures from ceramic clay, handpaints them all using a jeweler's loupe to help him see the fine detail work, and then constructs scenes of varying complexity, depending upon the size container he is using. He uses old boxes and books and shadowbox frames, mostly fairly small, but he has a huge one on display that must have hundreds of figures in it. In every single scene is the joyous "Jubelkarl", a goofy character from a 400-year-old Austrian tradition which I am still trying to decipher from the German handout I was given. Jubelkarl is apparently some sort of let's-look-on-the-bright-side of things Pollyanna, jolly no matter what the circumstances, and not associated with any particular holiday tradition. His presence in these nativities is completely whimsical. He wears 17th-century Austrian garb and is waving his hat about with happy abandon.

The markets are also crammed with the usual German food stands, with some other regional specialties thrown in, like Hungarian Langos - the eastern European answer to Indian frybread, served with sheep's cheese, tomatoes, sauce - and Dresdner Handbröt which requires an outside brick oven to bake the handmade bread stuffed with cheese to a melting wonder. There's wurst, potatoes in a dozen incarnations, huge pans of cooking mushrooms and onions, kraut and kale, flame-cooked salmon, goulash and soups, pasta, pizza, crepes, pastries, candies, and hot chocolate so thick you have to eat it with a spoon. My favorites are the nuts that are tumbled with a sugar mixture in a heated copper kettle until the sugar has cooked into a crunchy coating. Still warm from the vat they are excruciating. My dentist would be appalled at my consumption. The candy stalls also sell frosted gingerbread heart cookies of varying sizes (some of them must be 18" across) that are strung with ribbons and worn around the neck, and another newbie to me, the Schaumküsse, which are fluffy cylinders of lightly flavored delicate marshmallow cream dipped in a variety of chocolate coatings. (Can you tell by my loving description that I have also consumed several of these?) There is also, of course, beer. And Glühwein; everywhere Glühwein. (The German word for lightbulb is "Glühlampe"; I'm not sure if the warm spiced wine derives its similarly glowing name from the effect it has on its consumers - perhaps the glowing feelings it bestows, or the eventual transformation of those drinkers' noses from mere prosaic fleshy extrusions into something more incandescent. I may never know.)

So far I have no plans for Christmas myself. With the dollar continuing to drop against the Euro, an expedition to Crete is probably not in the cards. I thought about Mallorca as it's super-cheap to get there, but with Hannah gone I would have to board Maggie, which doesn't seem like it's in the cards, either. I am scoping out the Christmas concert scene and plan at least to get to a musical event or two, and will possibly go to Christmas dinner and a movie with an American friend from the Goethe Institute who is also familyless here. In any event, it's Christmas in Europe! What's not to love?