Merry Christmas

My Christmas was good. Maybe I should explain that in Germany we celebrate on the 24th. The gift giving takes place in late afternoon, at around 5 p.m. - at least in my family. We used to go to church before that, but now we either go to church at 10 or 11 p.m. or not at all. My dad and I decorated the tree on Friday. Yesterday, my sister and her boyfriend came by for coffee, then we played a board game (Der Palast von Alhambra) and then it was time for presents. The day as a whole wasn’t very Christmas-y for various reasons (No snow, and I watched my video tape with the Juanes concert that was on TV last week. Latino music sounds more like summer than winter, as you can imagine), but it was a good day nonetheless.

The 25th and the 26th of December are national holidays. One of the traditional Christmas meals is Gans mit Kloß und Rotkraut (also called Rotkohl or Blaukraut). In English, that’d be goose with dumplings and red cabbage. I won’t try to explain what kind of dumplings we’ll have cos there are so many types that I get confused. So I’ll just say we’ll have the ones most common in this part of Germany. We normally would have had this dish today, but as my sister and her boyfriend couldn’t come today, we’ll have it tomorrow.

So much for food traditions. Let’s move on to TV traditions: one of my favourite films EVER has started becoming a Christmas classic. I don’t know which TV channel started it a couple of years ago, but it’s on a different channel every day at the moment. It’s called Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel and it’s the Czech version of my favourite fairytale Aschenputtel, i.e. Cinderella. The film is from 1973 and it’s absolutely wonderful. Cinderella is a bit of a tomboy in it. She can ride horses and hunts and shoots like a man. The film is set in winter so it fits the Christmas season. The music is great, too. One of the best scenes is when the carriage in which the evil stepmother and her spoilt daughter sit gets stuck in a huge puddle of mud and the prince stops trying to pull them out when he realizes the girl is not the one he’s looking for. A great fanpage about the film can be found here (there's an English version there, too).

There’s another film I watched yesterday. It’s an American TV movie called A Season for Miracles starring Carla Gugino and the very cute David Conrad. I first saw him in the short-lived TV series Relativity (called Beziehungsweise in Germany). He played a young architect who falls head over heels in love with a woman he meets in Rome (Italy). Of course, she’s about to get married to someone else etc., etc. I loved that show. Then he had a recurring part in Boston Public and was a regular in Miss Match where he played Alicia Silverstone’s love interest, but that show didn’t even get a full season order either, unfortunately. Anyway, David Conrad was in that very kitschy Christmas movie so I couldn’t help watching it. I had already seen it last year, but that was on the night when I was getting sick and so I was heading for the bathroom every 5 minutes and couldn’t fully enjoy the film. Here's a pic of David Conrad: