On our recent journey home, Elisha, Jakob and I spent a night in Frankfurt as a way to break up our long trip. During our time there we booted into town and took in the Christmas Market. I have to say, nobody does the trappings of Christmas as well as the Germans! We thouroughly enjoyed all the sights, smells, and sounds of the market. There were open pit fires roasting piles of wurst (brats to you Yankees), Gluhwein stalls selling hot, spiced red wine that really hit the spot in the drizzly weather, as well as booths selling ornaments, chocolotes, German cookies, gingerbread, pork products and all sorts of other things. It was a refreshing blast of Christmas Kitsch! Unfortunately, it seems that Christmas in Germany remains largely Kitschy and misses the life changing message of Christ’s coming “to save us all from Satan’s power, when we were gone astray”, as the old carol goes…
Here’s a picture of a small portion of the market in the central square. I forgot my camera at the hotel, and so this is a scanned postcard…
I also bought 2 more postcards that may appeal to some of you history buffs. The pictures below show what Frankfurt’s central area looked like before and after WWII. Talk about devastation. It’s unbelievable, really. And to think that countries could rebound from this kind of catastrophe. It makes the economic meltdown of 2008 seem pretty insignificant.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
I saw similar pictures when I went to Berlin…amazing the amount of displaced individuals there were after the war. I guess you would understand better than most.
Glad to see you were able to make it home for the holidays!
Comment by jim b — December 11, 2008 @ 2:07 am |
I know what you mean about the German’s doing Christmas well… I loved being there over Christmas many moons ago… and I love the Kristkindle Markts, the postcard brings it all back to me. But you are also correct in saying they miss the boat on the real reason… too bad actually.
Comment by Annelie Teixeira — December 24, 2008 @ 2:03 pm |