The German-American Heritage Society of Greater Washington, D.C.
A Child's Christmas in the Bavarian Forest
What fascinated me most about Christmas as a child were the three Kings who had come from far away Asia and Africa to visit the Christ Child in Bethlehem. Perhaps they captivated me so much because I too had come from far away: I came from the treeless plains of Nebraska to the mountainous Bavarian Forest or Bayerischen Wald. I arrived there in 1934 at the age of 7 months. My father, an instructor of German language and literature at Creighton University in Omaha, where I was born, had decided to pursue a Ph. D. While he was studying in Munich, Germany, I stayed with my mother in her native village of Haibuehl on the Bohemian border. My father returned alone and jobless to the United States in the depression year of 1937.
In our farming village of Haibuehl, Christmas began on Christmas Eve. The four weeks before were called Advent, the coming. This was a time to prepare for the coming of the Savior. We sang Advent hymns filled with yearning and anticipation:
Tauet, Himmel, den Gerechten,
Wolken, regnet ihn herab!
Heaven, bring down the Savior like dew,
Clouds, rain him down on us!
There were no Christmas parties; people went to Mass. The priest wore purple vestments, the color of penance. An evergreen wreath with four white candles hung from the ceiling of the church. On each of the four Sundays of Advent, a new candle was lit to mark the time until the Great Day. On the First Sunday, one dim white light shone all alone. Finally, on the Last Sunday of Advent, four bright flames turned the wreath ito a golden halo. I could hardly wait for Weihnachten to arrive.
Sankt Nikolaus
We children didn't sit on Santa Claus's lap telling him what toys we wanted. In fact, Sankt Nikolaus didn't bring you any toys at all; only apples and nuts and only if you had been good. If not, he would leave you pieces of coal. I looked forward to December 6th, his feast day, with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. If you had been bad, you could expect a good switching from his faithful companion, Knecht Ruprecht, and if you had been really bad, Ruprecht would carry you away in his sack. This I firmly believed, although it never actually happened to me.
At a more advanced age of life, I let it be known that I no longer believed in Sankt Nikolaus. Then one December 6th, he made a personal visit to my house. He wore his bishop's miter and cope, and he carried a blank ledger from which he read all my transgressions. I didn't really get a good look at him, because I was hiding under our kitchen table. But it was surely Sankt Nikolaus! How else could he have known all my misdeeds from the past 12 months? When he was finished with his admonishments, he left me some apples and walnuts; so everything turned out all right after all.
A year or so later, I learned that Sankt Nikolaus had actually been the farmer across the street--Meindl--whom I saw almost every day. But when he appeared in my kitchen that night, I was convinced that he was truly the holy bishop. Alas, my childhood Santa Claus didn't live long enough to grow a long, white Santa Claus beard like all the other old men in our village. Not long afterwards, Meindl was drafted into the infantry. He was killed on the eastern front just when his second son was born. The Christmases of the war years were thus a mixture of joy and sadness. But despite the many deaths of young men and the deprivations of war time, people still managed to squeeze a little bit of happiness out of what was supposed to be the most joyful season of the year.
Preparing for Christmas
Christmas was coming, and snow was its harbinger. In our mountains, it always snowed in December, and once it snowed it never melted until spring. The first snow fall was always the best. We kids ran barefoot the year round until the first flakes fell. Then we jumped gleefully through the fine, white down. The warmth of our feet melted the snow and left the sharp, dark imprint of our feet in the midst of the white. Albrecht Duerer could not have rejoiced more in his creations. But, alas, it also meant an end to our carefree, barefoot days. But there was Christmas ahead!
Just before Christmas Eve, every family in our village fetched its tree from the nearby woods. Some of the young men climbed to the top of tall firs and cut off the tips so that the rest of the tree could continue to grow. But everyone was free to cut down any tree they wished and take it home free. But not any tree would do. It had to be a Silbertanne. And this silver fir had to be absolutely straight and fully balanced and completely perfect in every way. Only such a tree was fit to serve as a Christmas tree and bear the white candles that would shroud it in a golden halo on Christmas Eve. To this day when I smell a burning candle, I think of Christmas.
The Weihnachtsbaum I enjoyed the most in my childhood was a tiny one decorated with thin, white candles; it was set up especially for me on our kitchen table. I was sick that Christmas, so my mother let me sleep on the sofa in the kitchen, the only heated room in our house. It was a beautiful little tree, and it was all mine.
Midnight Mass
Midnight Mass was the high point of the year for me. Village boys swung from the ropes in the church tower to toll the bells. The first bells rung out half an hour before midnight to let the distant farmers know it was time to set out for church; then the bells pealed again about 15 minutes before 12 to give everyone time to hurry into church. People waded through the crisp, deep snow from the neighboring villages and the distant mountain farms. They all walked to Midnight Mass in our parish church that was only three or four snowball throws from my house. Inside our church, the aroma of incense mingled with the scent of freshly cut firs, while that altar glowed golden from the flames of candles. Midnight Mass was the only time of year when the strains of a violin joined the voices of the choir and the tones of the organ as all sang:
Es ist ein Reis entsprungen
aus einer Wurzel zart;
wie uns die Alten sungen,
aus Jesse kam die Art
und hat ein Bluemlein bracht
mitten im kalten Winter
wohl zu der halben Nacht.
From roots so fine and tender
sprouted forth a stem;
it was of Jesse's race
we learn from ancient lays.
In midst of coldest winter,
about the midnight hour,
it bore a little flower.
When we came out of church well after 1 in the morning, we heard loud salvos from the mountains. Some of the young men were shooting off their Stutzen. The sound echoed from peak to peak. This custom of shooting off hunting rifles hearkened back to pagan times: In the olden days, people had believed that the evil spirits who haunted the longest nights of the year could be scared away by noise. But now the noise making had a different purpose: People were making a joyful noise in celebration of Christmas.
When we arrived back home from Mass, our family, like all the others in the village, broke fast with a breakfast of Mettwurst. Matins sausage was blood sausage fried in a pan; it was a prelude to the Christmas goose we would have for dinner.
Weihnachtsbaum and Krippe
When the village children who were too young to attend Midnight Mass woke up on Christmas morning, they discovered that the Christ Child had decorated their Weihnachtsbaum during the night. The Christkind also brought the presents--what presents there were during the war. But Christmas wasn't really about presents; it was about feelings--feelings of awe and wonder, love and joy.
What fascinated boys like me the most about the Christmas tree were the tiny glass trumpets suspended from its branches. After trying out all the blue and red and golden horns on our tree on Christmas morning, I went to the Meindl house across the street to blow into theirs. This wasn't as easy as it sounds, because these tiny trumpets were made of very thin glass; you had to be very careful not to bite into one. But each produced a unique note, and together we boys made a fine concert.
I also wanted to visit Gerhard, Meindl's eldest son, and look at his creche. Incidentally, Gerhard was named after me. When he was born, I told his mother that she should give him my name so that they would always remember me when I went back to America. Gerhard's Krippe had villages, streams and mountains that looked just like our Bavarian Forest. The fields were made of moss that we kids had gathered in the woods. The Holy Family, the angels and shepherds and the villagers were all carved by local wood carvers. It was one of the seven wonders of my world.
New Year
On New Year's Day, the poorer boys went from house to house wishing everyone "a happy and blessed New Year" in our Haibuehler dialect:
Glickseis Nuis Jahr!
I winsch eich a langs Lebn,
a gsunds Lebn
und an Geldbeitl voll Geld danebn!
I wish you long lives,
healthy lives,
and a bag of money besides!
It was my job to sit at the kitchen table and hand each boy a 5 or 10 Pfennig piece after he had recited his rime.
The Three Kings
On January 6th, the feast of the Three Kings, I was sent down the street to the grocer to buy incense; it was the same kind the priest used during Mass. My grandmother heated the spice in a frying pan on the stove; then I followed her as she went through the house incensing each room and inscribing these characters over each door with blessed chalk:
19 + K + M + B + 43
The three letters stood for the Three Kings who had followed the star to Bethlehem: Kaspar, Melchior, Balthasar. The sacred incense would drive the evil spirits from the rooms; the holy letters over the doorways would prevent their return.
Christmas During World War II
At one Christmas during World War II, every child in our village received an orange. What a rare treat that was! But it left a bitter aftertaste. Like all the children, I devoured my orange--pulp and all. My little orange was quickly gone, and all that I had left was the rind. Like the other children, I then dug my teeth into the white part of the rind. It had, after all, come with the orange and still tasted fainly like orange. Then there was only the orange peel left. We tried our teeth on that too, not because we were ignorant, but because we were insatiable. When you get a tiny orange every few years, you don't want to waste any of it. Until finally our taste buds called halt.
In 1944, Christmas fell in the midst of cruelest war. Would there be Christmas at all this year? The Nazis had taken away our church bells to cast them into bullets. They left us only the death knell. The Nazis decreed that Midnight Mass would have to be celebrated in the afternoon lest enemy bombers see the lights shining through the big church windows. "Midnight Mass at 5 in the afternoon?" the people protested. "This is no Christmas at all!"
Christmas that year featured B-19's; both real ones and dummies. The latter were roughly cut out of wood by Ukrainians forced to work in a local factory. The models were supposed to help flack gunners and fighter pilots identify enemy planes. Because there were no toys that Christmas, the factory owner gave some of these crude replicas to my aunt to sell in her store. But there wasn't exactly a run on them; we children could, after all, see the real ones flying overhead almost every day.
The bombers had almost frightened me out of my mind the time they had dropped their bombs near my school in Cham, a nearby town where I attended Oberschule. But when the front came closer and our school was closed, I was sent back to my village. Here I noticed that the farmers, who were mostly old men or women, didn't bother to look up when the planes streamed overhead. Filling the sky over Haibuehl, from high in the heavens they dropped silver tinsel down on us. We boys collected it eagerly, and paid no heed to the Nazi propaganda that it was poisoned. It didn't look so very different from the tinsel on our Christmas tree.
In April 1945, there being no more school, I was playing with my friend Werner at the entrance to our village. Overhead I saw a little plane and coming down the road toward us a little car. From the side of the open vehicle stuck out a black object like a black-clad arm giving the stiff-arm salute. I said to Werner, "Here come some more of those damned SS." Then the black arm swung around and pointed straight at me. Now I saw that it was the barrel of a heavy machine gun. Then I noticed the white star on the hood of the car--the Christmas star.
I couldn't have been more excited had Martians landed in our village. I jumped to my feet and ran up the steep hill to our house, faster than I had ever run before or since. Besides myself, I shouted the glad tidings to all: "Die Amerikaner sind hier!"
Christmas came late that year but more bountiful than ever. Our gifts were chewing gum, chocolate and exotic foods in green cans. Our Santa Clauses wore olive drab. Later my father would return wearing the same uniform and the chevrons of a tech sergeant.
What was Christmas like during World War II? In the midst of the most horrible war in history, the human spirit evinced its invincibility:
In midst of coldest winter,
about the midnight hour,
it bore a little flower.
What was Christmas like in the Bavarian Forest? It was a celebration of childhood and motherhood. It was an enchanted time of childlike innocence and trust, magic and marvel, tenderness and love. It's a feeling that I try to recapture each Christmas as I attempt to return in my mind to my childhood in the mountains.
By Gary (Gerhard) Grassl, December 1999