Feste — Holidays

Why the shops were shut, and when Christmas actually is

Two things about the German calendar catch newcomers, and the first is constitutional. Public holidays are legislated by the Bundesländer, not by the federation, so the number and the identity of them depends on where you live. Only a handful are nationwide. The rest follow the historical religious geography: Fronleichnam, Allerheiligen and Mariä Himmelfahrt in Catholic areas, Reformationstag in Protestant ones, with the result that Bavaria has around thirteen days and Berlin rather fewer. Moving from one state to another therefore changes how much time off you get, and the day you discover this is usually a Thursday when your own office is open and your sister's is not. The consequence that bites is the closing. Shops in Germany are shut on Sundays and public holidays under state shop-closing laws, with narrow exceptions for stations, airports, petrol stations and bakeries. On a holiday you did not know about, a normal supermarket run is simply not available. The habit locals have is to shop on the Saturday before anything, and the visible version of it is the queue at the till on the eve of a long weekend. A calendar for your own Bundesland is genuinely worth setting up in your first month. The second surprise is Christmas. German Christmas happens on the evening of the twenty-fourth: Heiligabend, with the tree, the meal and die Bescherung, the giving of presents, often after a church service and frequently ending earlier in the evening than visitors expect. The twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth are the statutory holidays and are spent on family visits and eating rather than on presents. Shops close early on the twenty-fourth — often at one or two — and the twenty-fourth itself is not a public holiday, so many people work a short day. If you are invited to a German family for Christmas, the evening of the twenty-fourth is the event. The run-up is long and is half the point. Advent has four Sundays, each with a candle on an Adventskranz; Adventskalender are for adults as well as children; and the Weihnachtsmarkt opens in late November and is a social institution rather than a tourist attraction — people meet there after work for Glühwein in the way they would otherwise meet in a bar. Nikolaus on the sixth of December is a separate small gift occasion, particularly for children, and is not Christmas. Silvester, finally, is not a public holiday, which surprises people who assume the thirty-first is free. The first of January is. Private fireworks at midnight are legal on that one night and are enthusiastically used, to a degree that is startling the first time and is the subject of an annual argument about litter, injuries and air quality. The greeting beforehand is Guten Rutsch, a good slide into the new year, and afterwards Frohes neues Jahr.