saint Nicholas and preparing for Christmas...

so the festive time of the year has begun and I'm slowly training robin in the Christmas and pre-Christmas rules and traditions. Like always obey your hubby and give him all your chocolate..

So first of all we are proud to announce that we have our first Christmas tree together and my first 'Christmas tree in my house' ever.

yip it's a tree

Now as you can see in this picture that this is not a normal tree. No everything and I mean everything in our house has currently little pink labels on it, to ease Robin into the German language.

Now who knows me, knows that my favorite colors are red and blue. More tending towards red for some reason and so I was pleasantry surprised that the most Christmas ornaments were red too. It's always amazes me how similar Robin and I are.

Another important custom Robin had to learn, was the custom of Saint Nicolas. A brief overview, who are not familiar with this custom:

In Germany, Nikolaus is usually celebrated on a small scale. Many children put a boot called Nikolaus-Stiefel (Nikolaus boot) outside the front door on the night of 5 December. St. Nicholas fills the boot with gifts and sweets overnight, and at the same time checks up on the children to see if they were good, polite and helpful the last year. If they were not, they will have a tree branch (Rute) in their boots instead. Sometimes a disguised Nikolaus also visits the children at school or in their homes and asks them if they have been good (sometimes ostensibly checking his golden book for their record), handing out presents on the basis of their behavior. This has become more lenient in recent decades.

So we both found something little under the tree in the early morning.

And as you can see in the pictures, I managed to get my camera working again. Turned out both of my rechargeable batteries were dead and it worked with normal once just fine. Happily I got a battery on sale at amazon and so we will be able to take more pictures again.