Christmastime has officially begun...

Well, it's official - Christmas has arrived in Germany, and it's here full-force.

Although the Christmas markets opened for the first time this past weekend, this has certainly not been the first sign of it approaching. In the US we are lucky enough to have some sort of division between seasons (even though we don't necessarily always stick with them). We have Halloween in October, Thanksgiving in November, and finally Christmas in December.

In Germany, however, both Halloween and Thanksgiving are non-existent. Therefore I've been seeing Christmas candies and decorations in the grocery stores for about a month now. (Yes, I bought Christmas lights, BUT they were purely for decoration purposes and weren't super Christmasy!) Even though I get pretty trigger happy when it comes to listening to Christmas music and watching Christmas movies, I really began to appreciate Thanksgiving simply for the fact that it packages the Christmas season up quite nicely.

So yes, Christmas has arrived and with any luck I'll be posting some pictures from Christmas markets soon (I'll be going to Dortmund the first weekend of December, and then down south to Salzburg for the second weekend).

The small group of us from the US has refused to forget about Thanksgiving, and we've organized a pot-luck style dinner this coming Saturday (cross your fingers that everything turns out okay...turkey and all). As you can imagine, Germans know absolutely nothing about Thanksgiving. I asked one of my tenth grade classes what they had heard about American Thanksgivings and all they could come up with was "Turkeys?" Needless to say, I'm giving them a presentation on Wednesday - I can't wait to see their reaction to the tradition of the president pardoning a turkey!

25 more days until I come back home, and it can't come quickly enough! I do enjoy my time here, but there's a heck of a lot of dead time to fill and not too much going on in my little town.

So sorry about the lack of posts, but I'll do my best to start punching them out more often!

Alles Gute und bis bald!