'Tis the season to be German

RITUALS:The partying starts early in Berlin, writes LOUISE EAST, along with the carol singing

A COUPLE OF WEEKS ago, on a cold crisp Sunday afternoon, I attended a rather smart drinks party in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. At the door (carved wood, double-height), black-and-white clad staff take coats, and offer glasses of fizz or carafes of Bloody Marys.

An architect discusses the agonies of moving house with a childrenswear designer. An installation artist shows photos of the Thanksgiving meal she had cooked up in her tiny, hot-water-free studio. A public policy researcher nips out for a cigarette. Trays circulate, holding tiny duck-egg-blue cups of carrot soup and glistening heaps of devils on horseback. Elvis, a cheerfully deaf terrier, lets it be known that he’d like to chase a piece of chewed-up rope ASAP, and a small Darth Vader pursues a wheezy Mr Incredible down the hall.

All fairly standard, if elegant, drinks-party fare until 3pm, when our hostess, an attractive blonde in dark-blue velvet, begins to circulate with song sheets. Immediately, everyone drops the small talk and gathers around the piano. As the first chords of " O du fröhliche, o du selige" ring out, we launch into 30 minutes of exuberant, unselfconscious carol-singing. Children are catered to with favourites such as O Tannenbaumand Kling Glöckchen, Klingelingeling, but it is clear the singing isn't part of the proceedings just because the kids like it.

“I adore Advent songs, even though I’m dreadful at singing. It’s my favourite part of the whole day,” Veronica, the hostess, says. Growing up in Bavaria, she and her entire family (all tone-deaf, according to her brother) used to gather around the piano every Sunday before Christmas, and Veronica has chosen to continue the tradition on the first Sunday of Advent in Berlin.

She’s a particular fan of anything in a minor key or in Latin. However, this year she’s opted for a slightly lighter repertoire after several friends e-mailed following last year’s sing-along, to suggest that 50 minutes of singing was a tad generous, and wasn’t there anything a little, well, more cheerful? There are no such complaints this year. The final “klingelingeling” is sung with such gusto that a baby bursts into tears and deaf Elvis pricks up his ears.

I was first tipped off as to how seriously Germans take Advent last year when I received an invitation from a menage of serious hipsters. He takes the best party shots in Berlin; she is a part-time burlesque dancer. Yet here they were, inviting friends to their Neukölln pad to celebrate Advent with waffles, stuffed apples and hot chocolate. I examined hosts and guests repeatedly but couldn’t find symptoms of irony anywhere. Even the Advent wreath or Adventskränz was a model of kitsch-free restraint: some fir branches tied in a loose hoop round four white candles, one to be lit each Sunday until December 24th. Perched on the sofa beside me, the Indian family who owned the kiosk downstairs looked similarly disconcerted. “We don’t do this at home,” the mother confided. “Neither do we,” I replied.

Now, that’s clearly a lie. In churches across Ireland, a candle is lit each Sunday in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and hymn-sheets speculate on the arrival times of the three wise men, rather like a sung version of Teletext. In Kinnegad, Kildare and the Kingdom, doors are jemmied open and small cardboard safes raided for the chocolates now standard in most Advent calendars (my sister preferred the tiny squares of card to the chocolates, so it was truly an Advent celebration for me).

But when it comes to Advent, we’re in the halfpenny place compared to Germany, the country in which the Christmas aesthetic was pretty much invented (prince Albert brought the Christmas tree to Britain when he married queen Victoria; FW Woolworth made a fortune exporting the first glass baubles from Germany to the US in the 1880s).

Promptly in mid-November, the large flower shop on my street cleared away its usual stock of tulips and chrysanthemums, and installed in their place several hundred Adventskränze: massive, tiny, gaudy, traditional; some with glittery purple candles, some with plain white; decked with berries, ribbons, cinnamon sticks and tiny gold bells or simply a twist of fir and pine. Across town, in the huge Catholic church of St Ludwig, it was standing room only on the first Sunday in Advent. Above our heads, a pine wreath the size of a small roundabout was suspended in mid-air on a network of fine wire cleverly disguised with red ribbon. Germans are much less wussy when it comes to using real candles too. Even during St Ludwig’s children’s service, a proper flame lurched and flickered overhead. Unsurprisingly, whole aisles of the city’s department stores are given over to Advent calendars; the Neukölln branch of Karstadt even offers one with a can of beer concealed behind every door.

There is nothing so crass in Veronica’s beautiful apartment in Wilmersdorf. Her Adventskränz is a large, chocolate-coloured affair constructed of larch cones, small brown glass baubles and tall cinnamon-scented candles. Here and there lie large china platters piled high with clementines, sugar-dusted lebkuchen (soft spicy biscuits) and star-shaped cookies. The double doors are draped with a garland of pine and red ribbon and from the Jugendstil stucco ceiling hangs a giant ball of mistletoe: “For some serious snogging,” Veronica says sternly.

“The real reason we have the Advent party each year is that it forces us to decorate the house early,” she declares cheerfully. “If we don’t give ourselves that deadline, everything would sit in a corner until the 24th.”

Veronica’s husband Steve, a British ex-pat who’s lived in Germany for 17 years, retreats to his office during the singing. “Well, it’s all in German, isn’t it?” he says, deadpan. For him, the Advent celebrations are a happy compromise. “Look around: there’s no Christmas tree. Veronica refuses point-blank to put one up before December 24th, which is traditional here. And it has to be a real tree. Every year, I suggest an artificial one but she won’t hear of it.”

Veronica and Steve’s Advent party takes place during the Irish bailout negotiations, and I expect to be fielding anxious questions all day. Yet aside from a wincing, “Sorry about Ireland!” from Steve, no one seems the slightest bit interested in discussing the miserable state of Ireland’s finances. Mystified, I finally take one of the guests, a businessman, aside and say I am interested in hearing the reaction of German tax-payers to bailing out yet another EU economy, but that nobody seems to want to talk about it. Is everyone too angry? Are they being polite?

“No, I wouldn’t say so,” he says airily. “I think, honestly, most Germans aren’t really thinking about it.”

He reckons this is because most taxpayers have recovered from their early alarm over the Greece bailout, realising it doesn’t affect them much in real terms. But for this mournful Irish ex-pat, his second explanation is more poignant: “Also, people just think, well, [Angela] Merkel will deal with it. They know that Schäuble is very, very careful with money. If he says Germany can afford to give this money, then we probably can.”

Never mind the lebkuchen and the “klingelingeling”, this was truly a moment of cultural vertigo. Imagine believing your elected politicians are making careful, considered financial decisions on your behalf and that trust not being misguided. Imagine happily entrusting matters of national economic interest to paid public servants, leaving you free to “not really think about” the outcome.

In a U-Bahn station on the route home, I spy an Asian man selling simple Christmas wreaths (pine, red candles, a bow of gingham ribbon) and stop to buy one. Every autumn, I brace myself against the early onset of Christmas. Celebrating Advent, German-style, is a perfectly-timed reminder to drop the cynicism and embrace the sentimental, sugar-dusted wonder of it all. It’s a reminder, too, of the great pleasures to be gleaned from living abroad. There’s a world of difference between choosing to leave Ireland and being forced to do so, but for those reluctantly facing emigration, there can be some compensation: beer-flavoured Advent calendars, carol-singing hipsters, giant wreaths that just might go up in a puff of smoke. They’re small things to be sure, and no consolation for what you’ve left behind, but if you hadn’t left home, you’d never even have seen them.