Advent of a sticky stand-off

A biscuit battle has broken out in Frankfurt, and at the centre of the row is the Dominostein, a chocolate-covered gingerbread biscuit filled with marzipan. The reason for the sticky standoff? The city's bakeries have been selling Dominosteins for weeks, even though a tradition going back to the 14th century says the biscuits must not be eaten before the first day of Advent.

The letters to the newspapers have started and Frankfurt's moral guardians are bewailing the fact that Germany's financial capital is now the capital of an illicit trade in hot gingerbread biscuits. The way the traditionalists tell it, the biscuit bakers have turned pushers, starting the staid city's slide into gingerbread-induced decadence. Like everyone else in the city, however, Frankfurt's bakers are businessmen first and have no truck with the complaints. Anyway, they are too busy trying to keep up with customer demand.

"Nowadays we earn 25 per cent of our total Christmas biscuit sales during the month of September," says Hermann Buehlbecker, who owns Germany's largest supplier of seasonal biscuits, producing 500 million Dominosteins a year.

Germany's 82 million citizens consume an average of 1.3 kg of seasonal biscuits per person, accounting for 670 million deutschmarks (£268 million) in annual sales. They buy over 110,000 tonnes of gingerbread alone. Somehow they find room for the Christmas biscuits on top of their existing biscuit consumption, as sales of other non-seasonal biscuits hardly suffer during this period.

It was a relatively simple matter for manufacturers to extend the sales period for Dominosteins and other Christmas biscuits. They removed all references to Christmas from the packaging and sold the repackaged biscuits as "autumn biscuits" or "seasonal cookies", extending the sales period from four weeks to nearly four months. Bakers argue that extending the sales life of Dominosteins is not just greedy capitalism getting in the way of tradition but rather a case of giving the people what they want. People buy Dominosteins for "their own personal consumption" during the months of September and October because "that's when they taste the best", according to an industry survey. But the row in Frankfurt has also shed light on the twilight world of the German gingerbread addict.

"We see many people stocking up on spiced biscuits and gingerbread over the Christmas holidays to feed on them in spring," says Beate Bruenig, managing director of Germany's association of confectioners. Working your way through a tin of last year's gingerbread to overcome the post-Christmas blues might seem an odd notion to most, but not to the addicts who anxiously await the reappearance of gingerbread after months of abstinence.

When it comes to the Dominostein, they take quite literally the German proverb: "Take all you want, eat all you take."

That's good news for biscuitmaker Hermann Buehlbecker. Dominostein sales in Frankfurt have been good so far this year mostly because the weather has been so bad, he says. He's hoping for more bad weather, he adds, "because since times of yore, bad weather is gingerbread weather".