Our father said that someday we would have a real German Christmas.
He said the words hopefully. He said them as if we should look forward to this - a real German Christmas - as much as he did.
He was holding a box open for us to see. The box was full of small, silver metal flowers with spring clips attached to the underside of each blossom. My brother, my sister, and I peered into the box. We didn't know what the silver flowers were or what our father meant. Our mother rolled her eyes and shook her head.
Both my father and his father were ophthalmologists and practiced medicine in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There was a small, German immigrant population in Elizabeth, and many of those Germans came to the Doctors Griesemer. My grandfather had been born in Pennsylvania Dutch country and could speak German fluently. My father spoke it some. I have a couple of German phrases stuck in my brain courtesy of those two men: "Guten morgen, Johann. Wie geht's?" and "Aller Anfang ist schwer."
One of my father's elderly patients, Mrs. Drosendahl, had given my father the box containing the silver metal flowers. Our grandfather was there and explained about the German custom of having lighted candles on the Tannenbaum.
Candles? My sister thought that was preposterous.This was suburban America in the 1950s. Everything ran on electricity, including Christmas tree lights.
My father looked down into the box of the silver-flower candleholders. "They would make a beautiful light, I bet," he said.
"A dangerous one," our mother said. "You could burn the whole house down." Her heritage was not German. She did not share my father's interest in a real German Christmas. She was interested, she said, in a "safe American Christmas."
"Would the candles be as nice as the bubbly lights?" my brother asked. He was enamored of a style of Christmas tree lights popular back in the 1950s in America - lights that illuminated small tubes of colored fluid that bubbled when heated by the bulbs. With his savings, he had purchased a string of the "bubbly lights" and hung them on his own special area of the tree. He would lie under that side of the tree - his side - and look up at his lights.
"I'm sure they would be as nice as the bubbly lights," our grandfather said.
"If we had the candles," my father said.
He explained that Mrs. Drosendahl had given him the candleholders as a gift. She said that she was sure she had brought a box of candles with her from Germany years ago, but she couldn't find it.
"Her eyesight isn't so good," our father told us.
"Isn't that why she came to you?" our mother said. "Because her eyesight isn't so good?"
Over the next few years, our father tried to buy candles that would fit the holders. No luck. The silver blossoms sat in their box each Christmas. My brother lay under his side of the tree and looked up at his bubbly lights. Christmases came; Christmases went.
My father may have thought that a real German Christmas meant candles on a tree, but now, years later, I know otherwise.
A real German Christmas is something I found as I traveled throughout Germany on book tours during the past two Decembers. A real German Christmas is far bigger than candles on a tree, far more encompassing.
A real German Christmas is an endless, fir- and light-bedecked tunnel that crisscrosses the entire nation and swallows millions of the country's citizens every year.
For me, a real German Christmas is... the Weihnachtsmaerkte.
I know, seen critically, Weihnachtsmaerkte are like troll villages inbred with shopping malls. They are cramped and crowded and only exist to sell us things.
But cramped and crowded fit the American clichés about Europe. And as for selling things, well, what American doesn't like that? When it comes to buying and selling, isn't that our purpose on the planet?
Wasn't it our president who told us after September 11th that it was important for us to keep shopping? There was a war on, he said, but we must continue to shop. If we stop shopping, the terrorists will have won.
That was four years ago. We're still at war, and we're still shopping. But I think all of that may just be a frenzy to make up for our lack of Weihnachtsmaerkte.
As I traveled about Germany during Weihnachtsmaerkte season, I would check into at my hotel in each city, make whatever connections were necessary with the local bookstore or the Literaturhaus, and then I'd head out.
Within a few moments, I always found the Weihnachtsmarkt.
As I entered its carnival world, I would become lulled by the slow, strolling pace of the other pedestrians in the little "streets" of the market. I would enter a trance as I drifted past all the decorations and figurines, the crafts and knick-knacks and kitsch for sale.
I would wake up when I came to food. I always purchased Bratwurst. And Mandeln. I became addicted to Mandeln.
Of the two dozen or so Weihnachtsmaerkte that I have toured, I think I know my favorite. I was journeying to Rostock late in my first tour of Germany. I was alone. I had never been to "the former East." For an American who grew up in the 1950s, the very words, the former East, conjured up mysterious images.
People told me that life is harder in the former East. Rostock, they said, might seem a little rougher, a little downhearted.
It was already dark as I walked under the glittering arch of lights over the Markt's main entrance. A wet wind howled in from the Baltic, making the strings of lights sway and bob. People wrapped themselves against the sleet. The salespeople in the booths, shifting back and forth on their feet, slapped their hands against their sides to keep warm. Nevertheless, everyone was smiling.
I decided to ride the brightly lit Ferris wheel that dominated the center of the Weihnachtsmarkt. It was the biggest Ferris wheel I'd seen so far in Germany, and it was empty. No one else at the fair seemed interested in riding the wheel that evening. The man running the machine looked at me as if I were a little crazy.
Up I went, alone in my gondola. The wheel stopped to let in another carload of people, on the far side from my car, and soon the wheel resumed its revolutions.
I rose high into the wind and rain. I looked out into the darkness. I felt the gale blowing in from Scandinavia. I imagined I could see ships' lights out at sea.
I looked down to see the gold and red and white lights of the Weihnachtsmarkt below me. I looked out toward the rest of the country, the former East, the West. I imagined all the Weihnachtsmaerkte spreading out in an enormous web across the land, a huge Christmas net cast all over Germany. The wheel plunged me down into the fair and pulled me back into the storm.
Then, I heard a howling. It was coming from the other car. There seemed to be some kind of trouble. A man was howling in panic.
The operator stopped the Ferris wheel with the other car at the bottom. People tried to coax the man out of the car, but he seemed too frightened to move.
As I sat at the top of the wheel, the wind cut into me. The rain began to freeze. The people moving around down there looked so far away. I felt as if I were in orbit in a doomed space capsule. Below me was Planet Weihnachtsmarkt. I might never see it again.
Eventually, the upset man left the car, the wheel began to turn, and soon I was on the ground again.
The operator was full of apologies. He made some gesture about the upset man who was still standing nearby, surrounded by what appeared to be attendants and friends. I could see the man was from a group of handicapped adults who were visiting the Weihnachtsmarkt. He was groaning softly and rocking, and his friends were patting him and calming him down. I nodded to the attendant. I was shivering and my teeth were chattering. I think all I could say was, "Aller Anfang ist schwer."
But I was calm now too. I was back where I wanted to be, on Planet Weihnachtsmarkt.
I bought a cup of Glüwein, and as I walked to warm up, I came across a booth selling Christmas lights. There, amid the electrical chaos was a box containing one string of bubbly lights, just like the ones my brother had loved as a boy. Planet Weihnachtsmarkt had placed this gift in my path. I bought the box.
I felt warmer and happy and pleased with myself. As I turned to stroll out of the Weihnachtsmarkt, I heard singing. I looked down a street between the booths and, at the end, I saw a brightly lit stage with a large crowd of children below it.
On the stage was a man dressed as Santa Claus and a woman dressed as one of his helpers. They were leading the audience in an energetic song. The sound was strident, almost harsh, they were singing so forcefully. The music was recorded, and perhaps their words were too. It was like some kind of severe Christmas karaoke.
But it had the crowd bouncing. I'm sure if I could tell you some of the lyrics, you would know the song. All I can tell you, though, is that it wasn't, "Aller Anfang ist schwer."
I clutched my box of bubbly lights and my cup of Glüwein, and I wandered in closer to the music and the excitement. I kept watching the Santa and his helper. Soon I was bouncing too. I looked around to find I had wandered in among all the children. Everyone's face was bright. The sleet had begun to turn to snow. Santa and his helper had us all singing. Or almost all of us. I was only able to hum along. It was enough. I was content.
I tried to tell my audience at the bookstore how much I had enjoyed their city's Weihnachtsmarkt, how happy I was that I'd found the bubbly lights for my brother, how I had come down from orbit and landed on Planet Weihnachtsmarkt and I'd found its inhabitants to be a lovely, bouncy, musical, and cheerful people.
The audience looked at me as if I were nuts. They were polite, but I think it was too much, this listening to an American go on about a Weihnachtsmarkt. They had come to hear some literature. I tried to get a grip on myself. I read from my book.
After the tour, I took the bubbly lights home to the States and gave the lights to my brother for Christmas. He couldn't believe it.
"Where did you find them?" he asked.
"Germany," I said.
"They use bubbly lights?" my brother asked. "They don't use candles? The real German Christmas must have changed."
"It has," I said. "I suppose."
We did have a real German Christmas once, the kind my father imagined.
It was mid-December and our grandfather arrived at the house one evening. He had come from the office where, he said, a man had stopped by.
"It was Mrs. Drosendahl's son," our grandfather said. "He said his mother had died. He had been going through her things, and he found this."
Our grandfather handed our father a box. On the top, in an old person's tremulous hand, was written, "For the Griesemer family."
My father opened the box. Inside were two dozen candles made to fit the holders.
"She found them!" my sister said.
We kids ran to put the candles on the tree, and our father prepared to light them. Our grandfather told him to start from the top and work down.
"Heat rises. Flames burn up," he said. "You don't want to catch yourself on fire."
"Please!" our mother said with a shudder.
But our grandfather knew what he was talking about. He must have done this before. Our father lit the candles, then sat down next to our mother, and we all basked in the special light given off by those old German candles of Mrs. Drosendahl's.
"So," our father said, "her eyes weren't so bad after all."