Frohes Fest

My last German Christmas has come and gone. I weep bitterly.

We made several visits to the Striezelmarkt this year. But Jethro and I had to pay it one last visit on its last day of operation. We meandered, bought a little Räuchermann, and I let Jethro go for a spin on a pretty terrifying merry-go-round that looked like it had been welded together in a junkyard using only found objects.



Then came the time came for us to go. (READ: I needed to use the little girls' room and didn't want to PAY FOR IT ... turns out there are some aspects of life in Germany that I won't miss). But despite my full bladder, I found leaving the sounds of German Christmas carols and the smells of Glühwein and crepes and roasting bratwurst behind me to be difficult.

Fortunately we'll be bringing a few small pieces of Christmas in Dresden back to America with us to help us remember the four lovely Christmases we spent here.

I think we had a skiff of snow on one of those Christmases, but otherwise our Christmases here have been pretty mild. This year was certainly our snowiest Dresden Christmas.

And while we're looking at our balcony, I need to mention something that is not related to Christmas.

We have a ton of pigeons in our neighborhood, and they seem to be particularly fond of our building thanks to the old woman on the third floor who insists on feeding them. We haven't had too many problems with them, but a couple of months ago Jake cleaned our windows. And apparently he did a pretty good job because later that day this large smudge appeared on our back door:

If you examine it closely, it's pretty clear that a pigeon slammed headfirst, with full wing extension, into our backdoor.

You can even make out the little beak. He or she apparently wasn't too seriously injured because there was no unconscious bird on our balcony or nearby.

And so I feel OK about finding the whole thing hysterically funny. We never washed the mark off, and every time we open the curtains we have a good laugh at the bird's expense.

And on that note, I hope you all had a great Christmas. I leave you now with a scene from our less-than-Biblically-accurate rendition of the Nativity.

JEM

P.S. Those other FIELDTRIP!s I was talking about earlier are still coming. For reals.