Eep! I got a little bit distracted today with various other things and am not quite ready with two posts I've been working on (oh, don't get your hopes up, one is a rant and the other is just a jumble of images - both are more likely to be posted as pieces of other things down the road). Happily, however, this evening I found a lovely surprise in my shoe and will share it with you! (In descriptive form anyway, as I do not share chocolate...in part because it's almost finished!)
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What's left of St. Nikolaus, Montpellier, FR.
December 2009. |
First, a quick lesson in Christmas Traditions: For us in North America, St. Nicholas and Santa Claus are synonymous. For Germans, from whom we borrow so many of our Christmas traditions, they are actually two separate people. On the night of December 6th, children leave out their newly cleaned shoes for St. Nikolaus to fill with nuts and fruits and candy. St. Nikolaus will only leave these things if children are well-behaved of course. For those who have been naughty, he leaves a switch. Sounds familiar doesn't it? And then, on December 24th, German children also believe that either Weitnachtsmann ("The Christmas Man" and our Santa Claus) or Christkind (The Christ Child) leaves gifts for them. Excellent traditions, first candy and then gifts! (Remind me why we didn't take the December 6th tradition too?)
And now for the fun part: Lucky for us in the colocation, Daniela, our German roommate, decided to keep the tradition going here. This evening she arrived home from work and dropped by my room to ask about my boots. I wasn't sure what she was doing, but let her see them and then got back to work at my computer. It wasn't until I heard Gaby laughing about something in her shoes that I thought to check mine: and low and behold, St. Nikolaus HAD arrived!
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