Happy New Year!
Tag Archives: Silvester
S.
Somebody Call The Tradition Commission!
Oh, they’ve contacted you already? Good. Whew.
Tradition can be a dangerous thing, folks. Just look at the old German New Year’s Eve custom of Bleigießen – telling fortunes by the shapes made when molten lead is dropped into cold water. Awful. As you can well imagine, countless millions have been maimed or died in the process. And did you know that they actually do this without proper supervision in the privacy of their own homes?
Thank goodness the EU is here to help. A new European Union directive has finally been enacted that prohibits this dangerous practice once and for all. Tonight will be the last time Germans will be allowed to recklessly place their lives and the lives of their children in danger.
This kind of stuff gets me right here. I really get emotional. Today the lead, tomorrow Santa Claus. The EU marches on.
Happy New Year!
Bye, bye, Blei: Im Zuge der neuen Chemikalienverordnung der EU müssen die Deutschen ab 2018 auf das Bleigießen an Silvester verzichten.
PS: Remember to be extra careful with those Polish firecrackers tonight, people.
Whose Fingers Are These?
Happy New Year already.
Police in Leipzig found two fingers somebody had blown off last night that nobody had claimed yet so they called Sherlock Holmes for help, I assume. He must have suggested that they call the emergency medical service number because when they did they were able to locate a patient matching the description perfectly. Missing two fingers, that is.
Somebody in Duisburg blew off three fingers. I haven’t got the missing finger count here in Berlin yet but there were fourteen serious incidents so I’m betting on a least a dozen. The main thing is that everybody has a good time, I say.
Alkohol und Schwarzpulver – eine fatale Mischung für einen Mann, der am Hauptbahnhof gefeiert hatte.
German Of The Day: Böller, Pfannkuchen, Pfefferspray
Silvester (New Year’s Eve) preparations are in full swing here in Germany, folks. So for any of you who might be enjoying the New Year’s Eve celebrations here tomorrow please keep these German words in mind.
Böller are firecrackers, usually big honking firecrackers, that Germans love blowing up for hours and hours and hours and hours on end, preferably blowing off a finger or two in the process. This is an ancient Germanic tradition that goes back to the Roman era. In Germania, Tacitus tells us, the Germanen often flipped off Roman soldiers during New Year’s Eve celebrations but, being drunk, were easily captured and then got their Stinkefinger cut off as punishment. After the Romans left new ways of removing fingers had to be developed.
Pfannkuchen or Berliner Pfannkuchen or just Berliner are pancakes, eaten in massive amounts around midnight. This tradition goes back to the 1950s when a Berlin housewife messed up an American doughnut recipe by forgetting to add the hole and putting way too much jam filling inside instead.
Pfefferspray is pepper spray or mace and is a new tradition that began shortly after last year’s Silvester celebrations, introduced in Cologne by another Kulturkreis (cultural circle), origins unknown.
In Sicherheit feiern – Mit Pfefferspray durch die Silvesternacht?
Speaking Of Explosions…
Germans typically turn their country into a war zone on New Year’s Eve, blowing the begeezus out of every small to medium-large object they can get their fingers on (fingers included) with big honking fireworks for hours and hours and hours on end. It’s just what they do.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon how you look at it), they are not “alone” this year and some communities are now banning setting off these fireworks near or on the grounds of the many refugee centers located in Germany now “out of concern about the psychological effects on refugees,” a lot of whom having come here from real war zones. As far as bad ideas from local government go, maybe this one isn’t that bad at all.
In der Ersten Verordnung zum Sprengstoffgesetz heißt es: “Das Abbrennen pyrotechnischer Gegenstände in unmittelbarer Nähe von Kirchen, Krankenhäusern, Kinder- und Altersheimen sowie Reet- und Fachwerkhäusern ist verboten.” Kommunen können darüber hinaus weitere Verbotsbereiche bestimmen.
“David Hasselhoff was the only one who stayed sober”
The biggest party of the year and I missed it, again.
Damn. Some procedure as every year.
Hasselhoff blieb oben nüchtern, die anderen tanzten feucht-fröhlich im Matsch.
PS: Ich wünsch Dir soviel gute Tag im Jahr, wie der Fuchs am Schwanz hat Haar.
Have a good slide!
Or so the Germans say (Guten Rutsch!), for Happy New Year!
That ought to be easy enough this winter. It’s been the coldest December here in Germany since 1969 (before global warming started screwing everything up).
So slide well into the new year–and slide responsibly.
Der Dezember war zugleich überdurchschnittlich feucht. Am Flughafen in Frankfurt fielen insgesamt 59 Zentimeter Neuschnee, so viel wie noch nie seit Beginn der Aufzeichnungen.
Observing Hermann 