zu Weihnachten

Holidays are finally over and now I can lie back and coast until Black History Month in February.

Spending Christmas in the dorms here in New Burning Castle (Neubrandenburg) would have been wicked boring, so before the holidays loomed near, I resolved to head back to South Germany. I figured someone would take me in, and worst case scenario the weather hasn't been that bad and the hobos seem friendly, so a homeless Christmas wouldn't have been too terrible.

Luckily, my friend Julia invited me to spend Christmas with her family, and I quickly accepted. I caught a Mitfahrgelegenheit from Berlin to Mainz. I dunno if I've talked about Mitfahrgelegenheit (MFG) before, but it's basically a cross between carpooling and hitchhiking. Anyways, I've always had good experiences with it. This time the driver required us to pay in advance over the website, which tacked on a 2€ fee. And in typical German fashion at least 1 hour of our trip was spent debating that fee. One girl said that she didn't think it was fair for her to pay an additional fee so that the driver had more certainty. She felt that she was paying both for a trip and basically for insurance for him. The driver said that if she didn't like the fee she could have found another driver. She countered that the idea of a fee violates the spirit of MFG, and that since he would have driven regardless of the presence or absence of passengers, the fee was just a money scheme. This when on for an hour!

Then the other guy in the car, maybe bored of debating but I doubt it, noticed my tattoo and asked what it meant. Normally I would explain it very openly, but the girl (the one pissed about the fee) was a physicist at the Max Planck Institute, and this is the moment I have been dreading since I got this tattoo. It's like when you get a Chinese character tattoo, and then you meet a Chinese girl. You have this gut wrenching fear that she will say, “You know your tattoo means 'genital warts', right?” So I asked her to explain the formula and then I tacked on my reason for getting it.

See MFG is so much better than taking the train!

I got to Mainz and spent the night there with Julia and her beau. The next day we went bouldering. I've never been bouldering before and I have the blisters to prove that I was a beginner. It was really impressing to watch normal looking people scale walls with a 45° outward incline.

But anyways, we finally get to the dorf that Julia is from, and Christmas began. Now in Germany, Christmas is a little bit different. The whole stocking thing doesn't happen. Instead you get candy in your shoes on the 6^th of December, but only if they're clean.

I still have no idea who left this

Also, whereas my mom puts up a Christmas tree (or two) the day after Thanksgiving, German trees go up decidedly later. 

Christmas also lasts three days. Presents are opened on the 24^th. The 25^th is a family day, and the 26^th is a friends day, more or less. Ohh, and Santa doesn't exist. Well, he doesn't exist like he does in the States. They have St. Nikolaus, the one who leaves the candy in the shoes on the 6^th, and then they have the Weihnachtsmann (Christmas man), who is the one you see dressed up like Santa on all the advertisements, but he doesn't seem to do much else, maybe he's retired, I'm not sure. The gifts themselves are delivered by the Christkind. When I asked who the Christkind was, I got a lot of different responses. I am fairly certain that the Christkind is neither St. Nikolaus nor the Weihnachtsman nor Santa Claus. Someone said it was a female angel, and then I also heard it was a baby. Anyways this Baby/Angel/Jesus entity delivers the presents, and it does so on foot, no reindeer involved. At one point a named Santa's eight reindeer, and was met with laughter, either because the concept of magical reindeer is simply the straw the broke the camel's back or maybe because Vixen's name sounds like the German word for masturbation. Oh, also in Bavaria and Austria, Santa or the Christkind or whoever has a helper. He is the Krampus. This video should explain everything.

Krampus did not pay me a visit, I must have been lost in the shuffle at immigration or something.

The rest of the Christmas days were very nice and relaxing. I got to meet Julia's family, spoke German the entire weekend, got some awesome gifts, and generally had a very very good time.