There used to be more tinsel - but not only on the Christmas tree, but also on the German hero's chest. For great-grandfathers and grandfathers went collecting medals in the hail of bullets of the last century and therefore rarely had a "Silent Night"... All the more their mothers and wives were anxious to make the little peace even more idyllic: The kitsch industry flourished! Whether it was a shapely smoke eater or a lore novel - what our ancestors put under each other's Christmas tree and recited and sang on Christmas Eve is almost unimaginable today. One more reason for the music cabaret artist and collector Jo van Nelsen to snatch these memories from oblivion and bring to light many a curiosity from the depths of dusty archives: Newspaper advertisements with obscure gift ideas and stories of double Santas and dead soldiers under the Christmas tree; poems for well-behaved children in sailor suits and HJ training booklets for organizing Christmas home evenings - they all combine to form an entertaining as well as creepy panopticon of German kitsch and heroism between the founding of the Reich and zero hour.All this accompanied by contemporary kitsch postcards and Christmas carols straight from the gramophone, as only a real Teutonic male choir can belt them out!
Be there as Archangel Gabriel announces the birth of Christ to shepherds through a funnel, socialists want to abolish Christmas, and French corsets are outlawed as an un-German Christmas gift. Give yourself over to an evening of kitsch and pathos, so that you too can join in heartily at the end with the verses:
"O Lord, my weak singing,
Take it in grace,
.x>BR
Once it shall sound better,
When I am in heaven."
Text source and more information about this event: https://www.frankfurter-buergerstiftung.de/node/2630
