Season’s bleatings from Germany

A search for plenitude in the Christmas markets of Bonn, Siegburg and Köln

I have never really been a Christmas person, but this year I have gone the whole hog. As whole as one of the hogs turning on a spit in Siegburg medieval market, but I am getting ahead of my tale.

It begins with a thirteen-year-old’s birthday. Little A no longer believes in Father Christmas. In the coming seven years she will cease to believe in anything. So Prof D and I took up an opportunity to eek out the last vestiges of childhood’s magic with a visit to a land of bright lights, street food, jolly crowds, and tremendous cake. We visited three different Christmas markets and felt to have eaten and shopped our way round the entire Rhein-Ruhr metropolitan region.

Our previous experience of a not-quite ‘echt’ German Christmas market was the one found, this time of year, in Birmingham. If you haven’t been, it’s jaw dropping. Dominating the city centre, it draws vast crowds of shirt-sleeved midlanders who quaff ice cold beer in ice cold temperatures, and they do so by the litre. It was little preparation for the civilised pleasures of Bonn.

So we hit the central Weihnachstmarkt within hours of arriving at Frankfurt airport. At the very moment we passed beneath a wide, glowing arch, which welcomed all visitors to this market, cathedral bells began to peal. Such joy! The spirit of Christmas was so clearly upon us, that anything seemed possible: gathering winter fuel, dashing through the snow, bringing figgy pudding. Anything for which our warm hats, scarves and gloves suited us.

Unbidden, another song came to me: ‘It’s the most wonderful time… of the year’. It swings, no? Briefly, ever so briefly, I felt like the good-natured protagonist of a coma-inducing festive movie. I felt like the hearty, mentally healthy, generous spirited font of love and good times, which a good parent must surely be, at least once a year. I stepped outside myself and began to consider the presence and the wholesomeness, which this setting was bestowing on us. I looked at D and was able to guess she was feeling something like this too.

And it was not hard to maintain the glow on my ruddy cheeks. We had mulled wine, and mulled non-alcoholic punch. We had pretzels and flammlachs (freshly flamed salmon) with chilli mayo. There was a towering pine tree festooned with gold LEDs, and a dinky carousel ride with spinning headlamps, and a neon trimmed ferris wheel, all of which reflected back from the varifocal lenses of my tinselled spectacles. My journey from a misanthropic cynic to wassailing family man was short and direct.

This was reinforced in the coming days. There were two or three more moments filled with crimbo spirit. In Seigburg, they serve up the Gluhwein with a medieval spin. All the stalls are lit by candles. This took us all the way back to the Middle Ages, while I continued to express my own middle-age. Gentle flames were to guide us from stand to stand. It was a trip: a very lengthy queue for roast pig led to the most perfect crackling which in turn led to a middle-aged high. We also ate oven-fresh rolls, tasting crystals of sea salt as we chewed the warm dough; this had a similar effect on D.

In Köln, we visited a gothic sky-scraper, a delicately buttressed cathedral so vertiginous that heaven might have been just the other side of the lofty criss-cross vaulting. Part of a crowd of tourists, we milled around taking selfies, largely oblivious to the mass in progress further up the nave. One could only wonder about the lives of the many artisans who carved the stone, gilded the crosses and stained the glass. I had reason to believe they liked good crackling.

We now gazed around dumbly, until the congregation suddenly raised their voices in song. This gave me a spiritual jolt for a nanosecond, but in that nanosecond I recalled all those lessons about the true meaning of this time of year. Recalled them and then forgot. We were soon pushing our way out of the exit and into the cold late afternoon air.

In the shadow of the cathedral was another Christmas market, a less fantastical apparition than found in either Bonn or Seigburg. The stalls were workaday and instrumental to the sale of a range of gifts which, it must be said, had little to do with Christmas. The twinkling lights did seem weaker. There was no choice but to join a sea of punters who flowed sluggishly past the expensive wares, it was a space in which my concern was about keeping us together and not getting lost. At one point we found ourselves caught in a human tectonic drift, squeezed into a slowly heaving moshpit, that was packed with visitors of all ages, in all states of anger. This too was the spirit of Christmas.

This suffocating mass of families – containing dozens of parents who were no doubt striving, like us, to be their best selves for the holiday season – were, more or less, facing an outdoor stage. It was gussied up in red and gold to heighten the mood of celebration. To complete a mood fitting the setting, there was a hard-working rock band up there, a covers band, who knew their market in all senses of the word.

I’m going to stick my neck out, destroy my charitable Christmas persona, and say that this band sounded terrible. But then a Germanic rendition of Fairytale of New York is not quintessential Christmas fayre. Or it it? Having seen this classic duet performed at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1988, by the actual Pogues, with the actual Shane MacGowan, and the actual Kirsty MacColl, it was, for me, a murder mystery. How did I get here?

Upon our return to Brighton, I was driving Little A to a basketball match when the original of this song came on Heart FM. “Do you like this song?” I couldn’t help ask the thirteen-year-old. “Yessss!,” she replied. “It’s SOOO good!” There it was, on the digital airwaves of a car radio, for a fleeting moment, much closer to home… Christmas plenitude. May you all experience something like it this season, no matter how briefly, no matter how incidentally.