Germany

Christmas in Germany is a children's festival. Although Christmas Eve celebrations vary from place to place, families everywhere for carols, presents, and a tree with lights, gingerbread animals, red apples and gilded nuts.

In many places, the holiday excitement starts in November or early December with a holiday fair in the market place. Hamburg's ancient Dom is probably one of the most famous fairs, not only in Germany but in the world. The Christkindlsmarkt, Kris Kringle's Fair, in Nuremberg is so old that no one knows when it began.

This fair features Nuremberg's "gold angel." In medieval times people came to the fair from distant places, as they still do. They combined merrymaking, buying and selling with going to church. There they saw the priest symbolically "give away the Christ Child" to the children in the form of a doll. After the Reformation, when few remembered the original custom, the Christ Child doll became the Christmas angel. Today a child in gold-colored robes represents the gold angel, and recites verses of welcome to the fair.

Children and parents alike joyfully remember Christkindlsmarkt from one year to the next, for here are wonderful sights and smells, and the gold angel that once was the Christ Child doll.