Christmas in the Erzgebirge

In the Erzgebirge, the festive season starts right after the Totensonntag (a day to commemorate the dead), when everybody puts up their Christmas decorations. My favourite item is the Schwibbogen (candle arch), which you can see in nearly every window. In the olden days, the Schwibbögen were made of metal and lit with normal candles, but today the wooden ones with electric candles are much more common. I even took a Schwibbogen with me to Northern Ireland when I spent my semester abroad there ;) 

Schwibbogen

For me, the most important day of Christmas is Christmas Eve. After a nice lie-in and breakfast, my grandparents put the turkey into the oven because it needs to roast quite a long time. For lunch we normally have soup, e.g. lentils or peas. In the afternoon, we drink tea or coffee and eat Christmas cookies and Stollen, which is a traditional Christmas cake filled with raisins, ground almonds and diced candied lemons and oranges. We also continue preparing our dinner. At 6pm, it is finally time to eat dinner. Every year we have turkey with green dumplings (made of cooked and raw potatoes), gravy and red cabbage. After that, my family and I exchange presents and watch some Christmas films. 

Turkey

Green Dumpling, Red Cabbage and Turkey

If you'd like to have a go at baking a Stollen, here is my favourite recipe :)

Ingredients

Stollen

500g	flour
300g	sugar
250g	butter
2	eggs
8g	vanilla sugar
15g	baking powder
250g	quark
250g	raisins
250g	ground almonds
100g	diced candiced lemons
100g	diced candiced oranges
5 drops	bitter almond oil

Instructions

1. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl.
2. Knead the dough until it feels smooth.
3. Shape the dough into an oval loaf and put it on a baking tray.
4. Heat the oven to 175°C and bake the loaf for 1 hour.
5. Brush the warm loaf with melted butter and dust it with powdered sugar.