Frankfurt Christmas

A feel-good book

As the 1963 Christmas song goes: "It`s the most wonderful time of the year". Yes, Christmas is indeed the most wonderful time of the year for many. If you walk through the Main metropolis in the weeks before the festivities, and especially through the Christmas market on the Römerberg, then it is almost impossible to escape the magic of this very special time. But Christmas is of course much more than mulled wine and twinkling lights. There are many different elements that make you feel so good during the weeks surrounding the festivities. Music, the smell of cookies, atmospheric stories and poems or even a good portion of nostalgia. In "Frankfurter Weihnacht" FAZ local editor Peter Lückemeier has compiled a number of stories from the FAZ archive, recipes, dialect poems and much more to create a real feel-good book. The result is sometimes contemplative, sometimes tasty, sometimes amusing or heartfelt. The "Weihnachtsgeschichte uff hessisch", for example, invites amused smiles, while the diary entries of a Swiss student from 1921 are more likely to give you goose bumps. On the other hand, lists of the most popular Christmas carols in Hesse or the highest temperatures on Christmas Eve since 1900 are completely factual. And of course Goethe must not be missing from a Frankfurt Christmas book.

The book is not only distinguished by its enormous variety of contributions, which make it difficult to put the book down again once you have started reading it. It is above all the loving work that has obviously been invested here in the research and compilation of the individual texts, poems, recipes, letters or newspaper reports. Peter Lückemeier has thus created a book that is both entertaining and interesting, that makes the reader feel the comforting warmth of the Christmas season, but now and then also makes him reflect. Moreover, he manages to indulge in nostalgia on the one hand, while at the same time building a bridge to the here and now.

Thus, "Frankfurter Weihnacht" makes clear what Christmas has meant to people of very different generations in Frankfurt and how this meaning has been able to hold its own against the many changes that Frankfurt has undergone over time and against an even more rapidly changing society. The perfect companion through the festive season, this book more than deserves the epithet "A feel-good book". Absolutely recommendable!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp