In Nuremberg-Nord, near Friedrich-Ebert-Platz, you could see a stately Christmas tree lying on the street on the afternoon of Boxing Day. Of course that’s where the mental cinema starts.
Was there no agreement and a second tree for the bathroom was not desired? Or was that just the maximally temporary The-bio-German-relatives-will-be-over-again alibiding? It could also be that a radicalizing local FDP politician entered his office on the second holiday, sat down at the desk, which was clearly visible from the outside, and worked on his “Germany-works-too-enough” New Year’s speech. The office tree was not appropriate.
One does not know. Just like over the holidays, a heretic always comes along with the clever question as to who actually started the foolishness of replanting coniferous plants in their native habitat, transplanting them into the living room and providing them with human gimmicks and an open fire. And someone always asks: Who invented it?
A clearly Gaga idea by all objective standards, fire-hazardous and difficult to dispose of, which has made a global career? A newspaper based in Munich basically makes it easy: Der Franke was it!
No, he was not. One Franke has only made a significant contribution to making this needling lace idea a seasonal world bestseller. The man was a Coburger at heart, had a difficult time as a foreigner in the British royal family as the husband of Queen Victoria, and apparently drove away his gloomy winter thoughts by indulging in local Christmas traditions: a tree, a tree!
That’s just how he was, the Coburg Prince Albert. But because the royal family was already popular back then and Victoria was difficult to Instagrammable, so to speak, media people were all over the story of the prince’s weird Christmas thing. 175 years ago, the Christmas home story from Windsor was pushed exclusively – and soon afterwards the tree burned worldwide.
Would the Christmas tree have started its global triumph without Franconia? Don’t know, probably not likely. One thing is certain: official tree collection only begins on January 8th in Nuremberg, the epicenter of the Christmas trendsetter region. Until then, the city asks you to control yourself.