kaberett | #7 Traditional pre-Christmas practices (Reply)

Okay, so this one is (~surprise~) a bit fraught for me, because a lot of my culture-of-origin identity is very bound up with Mitteleuropäischer expressions of Catholicism, so I end up feeling a lot more adrift with the whole atheist thing than is wholly comfortable.

All of which said, my traditional stuff is:

you make a wreath from misc evergreen from your garden (or, in the more specific sense, misc evergreen you've nicked from a Cambridge college's gardens); you place your Advent candle in the middle of it, and add a candle round the edge for each Sunday of Advent in the appropriate colors as they happen. Advent is very much a time of preparation & reflection: to think about what one has done and what one has failed to do, and all that.
the 6th of December, Heiliger Nikolaus: on the evening of the 5th, you polish your shoes and leave them lined up neatly beneath a window, and awake to find (if you've been good!) that Nikolaus has been by in the night and filled them with goodies, traditionally nuts & clementines & chocolate coins. (My mother normally manages to source chocolate Schilling - when that was relevant - and these days usually gets her hands on chocolate Euro. Me, I noticed that M&S were selling chocolate brussels sprouts and thought it would be worth it for the laugh). If you have not then instead the Krampus chases you with switches...
on the other side of the family, my father gets Very Definite about making mince pies in the week running up to Christmas; he normally makes a round twelve dozen, as I recall, glazed with water+sugar (because my baby brother is lactose intolerant). He makes the pastry - standard unsweetened shortcrust - but usually buys in the mincemeat; I am still working through the batch I made a couple of years ago, during The Winter Of My Discontent.
(My mother makes fruitcake and steamed puddings a little while in advance; she makes the marzipan and royal icing, and in deference to my tastes leaves the glacé cherries out.)
Otherwise, preparation waits until Christmas Eve: present wrapping and bringing in (and decorating) the tree (which lives in the garden), and setting up the crib, and so on. (The Wise Men then advance from the far side of the tableau to the stable over the course of the twelve days.) We listen to the King's Carol Service because my father, bizarrely, insists; my mother staples the Christmas cards to lengths of ribbon and hangs them from the walls; we get out the Strohsterne etc.

... and then we are into The Day Itself, which involves Church and arguments and I am kiiiiiind of intending to run back to London to spend the day with a bunch of heathens this year before heading back on Boxing Day.